The
above testimony from a Togolese child depicts a brief moment in the long and
terrifying ordeal of child trafficking. Child trafficking is the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of a child for the purposes of
sexual or labor exploitation, forced labor, or slavery. It is a human rights
tragedy estimated to involve thousands of children in West Africa and over a
million children worldwide. This report documents the trafficking of children
in Togo, in particular the trafficking of girls into domestic and market work
and the trafficking of boys into agricultural work. Hundreds of children are
trafficked annually in Togo, either sent from, received in or transited through
the country. They are recruited on false promises of education, professional
training and paid employment; transported within and across national borders
under sometimes life-threatening conditions; ordered into hazardous,
exploitative labor; subjected to physical and mental abuse by their employers; and,
if they escape or are released, denied the protections necessary to reintegrate
them into society. Their stories disclose an appalling chain of events that
the Togolese government has thus far failed to break.

West Africa's Trade
in Children

Togo's
trade in children is illustrative of a larger, regional phenomenon involving at
least thirteen West African countries. Based on the testimony of children and
local experts, Human Rights Watch documented four routes of child trafficking
into, out of, or within Togo: (1) the trafficking of Togolese girls into
domestic and market labor in Gabon, Benin, Nigeria, and Niger; (2) the
trafficking of girls from within Togo to other parts of the country, especially
the capital, Lomé; (3) the trafficking of girls from Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana
to Lomé; and (4) the trafficking of boys into labor exploitation, usually
agricultural work, in Nigeria, Benin, and Côte d'Ivoire.

Children
interviewed by Human Rights Watch came predominantly from poor, agricultural
backgrounds and had generally little schooling before being trafficked. Most
were promised that by going abroad they would gain some formal or vocational
education, which they could then use to earn money for themselves or their
families. In numerous cases, children were recruited by traffickers after
running out of money to pay for school; despite a statutory guarantee of free
primary education in Togo, school fees range from 4,000 to 13,000 CFA francs[2](U.S.$6-$20)
per year. Many of the children interviewed were trafficked following the death
of at least one parent. Others had parents who were divorced, or at least one
parent living and working away from home. A growing cause of orphanhood in
Togo, human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome
(HIV/AIDS) was identified by some experts as a possible factor in
susceptibility to child trafficking.

Togo's Trafficked
Girls

Girls
interviewed by Human Rights Watch were typically recruited into domestic or
market labor either directly by an employer or by a third-party intermediary.
Most recalled some degree of family involvement in the transaction, such as
parents accepting money from traffickers, distant relatives paying
intermediaries to find work abroad, or parents handing over their children based
on the promise of education, professional training or paid work. Following
their recruitment, girls' journey away from home in many cases involved an
intermediate stop where they could be left to fend for themselves for weeks or
months at a time, before being transported to a country or city of destination
by car or by boat. Human Rights Watch documented numerous cases of girls
taking boats from Nigeria to Gabon, a perilous and sometimes fatal journey. In
one case, a boat capsized off the coast of Cameroon and nine girls died.

On
arrival, girls were deposited in the homes of employers where they performed
long hours of domestic and market work. From as early as 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.,
children tended gardens, transported and sold market goods and baked bread. At
night, they worked as housemaids, prepared food and cared for small children.
Human Rights Watch documented astonishing cases of girls as young as three or
four years old being forced to carry infants or sell merchandise. Almost no
girl received any remuneration for her services. Many recounted incidents of
physical and emotional abuse, often leading them to escape and live in the
street. Officials from the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Terre des Hommes
told Human Rights Watch they had interviewed numerous trafficked girls who
experienced sexual abuse in the home, and that some had tested positive for
HIV. One child told Human Rights Watch she was forced to sleep in the same
bedroom as a male boarder and was "afraid he would rape me."

Togo's Trafficked
Boys

Boys
interviewed by Human Rights Watch were for the most part recruited into
agricultural labor in southwestern Nigeria. A small number worked on cotton
fields in Benin, and one child was recruited into factory work in Côte d'Ivoire.
Traffickers tended less to make arrangements with boys' parents than to make
direct overtures to the boys themselves-tempting them with the promise of a
bicycle, a radio, or vocational training abroad. Contrary to expectation, they
were taken on long, sometimes perilous journeys to rural Nigeria and ruthlessly
exploited. Most were given short-term assignments on farms where they worked
long hours in the fields, seven days a week. "When we were finished with one
job, they would find us another one," one child told Human Rights Watch.

Boys
worked from as early as 5:00 a.m. until late at night, sometimes with hazardous
equipment such as saws or machetes. Some described conditions of bonded labor,
whereby their trafficker would pay for their journey to Nigeria and order them
to work off the debt. Many recalled that taking time off for sickness or
injury would lead to longer working hours or corporal punishment.

The Prohibition of
Child Trafficking in International Law

The
abuses documented by Human Rights Watch fall squarely within the definition of
child trafficking in the United Nations (U.N.) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress
and Punish the Trafficking of Persons, Especially Women and Children,
Supplementing the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (2000;
known as the Trafficking Protocol). Togo has signed but not ratified both the
Trafficking Protocol and the Optional Protocol to the U.N. Convention on the
Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography
(2000). It has ratified both the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
and International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 182 on the
Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of
Child Labour (1999), the latter of which obliges states parties to take
"immediate and effective measures" to eliminate child trafficking "as a matter
of urgency." At the regional level, Togo has participated in multilateral
negotiations towards a regional anti-trafficking protocol for West Africa and
has signed numerous declarations of commitment to eradicate the practice.

The Failures in the
Togolese Government Response

Despite these
obligations, Togo has made insufficient progress in reducing the number or
severity of its child trafficking cases, and Human Rights Watch's interviews
revealed the inadequacy of Togo's system of protecting and rehabilitating
trafficked children. Togo's effort to develop a tougher response to child
trafficking in domestic law is on the wrong track.

Togo
has repatriated and reintegrated some trafficked children (with the assistance
of other countries with which it has bilateral agreements) and/or placed them
in the care of NGOs. However, other trafficked children have received no
targeted state help in repatriation and have found their own way home with the
help of civilians or police officers. This was particularly the case for boys
interviewed by Human Rights Watch who, at the end of their work term-usually
about nine months-were usually given a bicycle and told to find their way home:
they described riding bicycles from Nigeria back to their villages in Togo, a
journey that lasted up to nine days. Some boys were stopped by soldiers and
forced to bribe them in order to be let go. According to Togo's director of
child protection, some boys have died on the way home and have been buried on
the side of the road. One girl was improperly detained in a penal facility on
arrival back in Togo.

Numerous
government and NGO representatives attested to a lack of resources for
rehabilitating trafficked children, and children's testimony corroborated these
accounts. Interviews with several child sex workers in Lomé's so-called marché
du petit vagin (literally, "market of the small vagina") revealed that some
girls had come to Lomé under conditions of child trafficking and been forced
into sex work after escaping or being abandoned. A survey in 1992 showed that
HIV prevalence among sex workers in Lomé was already 80 percent.[3]

Aside
from bilateral repatriation agreements, the Togolese government's most concrete
responses to child trafficking have been the creation of local "vigilance
committees" to identify vulnerable children and track potential traffickers;
and the drafting of a law, currently before the national assembly, that imposes
a five-to-ten-year prison term on traffickers and/or a fine of up to 10 million
CFA (U.S.$15,000). The draft law imposes the same penalty on parents of
trafficked children who in some way or another might be regarded as complicit
in the sale or handing over of their children to traffickers; this includes not
only parents who are deceived by false promises of education and professional
training, but also those who fail to report known trafficking cases to the
police. No allowance is made for parents who resign themselves to sending
their children abroad in the good faith belief that they have no alternative or
that working abroad is in their child's best interests.

In
taking steps to eradicate child trafficking Togo must, with appropriate
assistance from donor countries, the United Nations and African multilateral
organizations, address the pressures that induce parents and other caretakers
to authorize the movement and exploitation of children. Child traffickers
capitalize not only on entrenched poverty, but also on inadequate access to
education, poor vocational opportunities, and orphanhood. They exploit a
widespread practice of employing girls as domestic workers, a tradition that
predates the advent of child trafficking. Their methods are facilitated by lax
border patrols, haphazard reintegration of trafficked children, weak
prosecutorial efforts, and in some cases corruption. In addition to holding
traffickers criminally responsible for their actions, and rather than incarcerating
parents who succumb to traffickers' false promises, Togo and its neighbors must
confront the social and political factors that allow such inhumanity to be
inflicted upon children.

II. MAIN
RECOMMENDATIONS

To all West African
governments implicated in the trafficking of children, including Togo, Benin,
Nigeria, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Gabon[4]

·Take immediate and effective steps
to prosecute child trafficking under domestic law, including the ratification
of the United Nations (U.N.) Protocol to the Convention Against Transnational
Organized Crime to Prevent, Suppress and Punish the Trafficking of Persons
especially Women and Children (2000-the Trafficking Protocol) and the Optional
Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children,
Child Prostitution and Child Pornography (2000). Enact legislation creating
the offense of child trafficking, consistent with the above protocols as well
as with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and International
Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 182 and Recommendation No. 190
concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the
Worst Forms of Child Labour (1999). Promptly investigate, prosecute and punish
perpetrators of trafficking in children, using existing penal laws until
targeted anti-trafficking legislation is enacted.

·Consistent with the consensus
decision of the 2002 consultation meeting in Libreville, Gabon, of twenty-one
African states, establish a regional anti-trafficking convention, ensuring that
any convention incorporates full protection of the human rights of trafficked
children. Include in the convention a consistent regional protocol for the
return, repatriation and rehabilitation of trafficked children, through collaboration
between "sending," "receiving" and "transit" countries, local NGOs,
multilateral organizations such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
and ILO, children and parents. Consistent with the above treaties, establish
protocols for police officers, gendarmes,[5] other state officials and outreach workers to follow
when children who claim to have been trafficked seek their help, including the
safe delivery home or to a place of safety, and monitor the application of
those protocols. Specify that children may not be placed in detention for
legal transgressions arising from their having been trafficked, and release any
trafficked child who has been placed in a punitive institution. Include
protocols to monitor the progress of child trafficking survivors and ensure
they are not retrafficked. Guarantee basic human rights protections such as
witness protection and alternative care for children who cannot be returned to
their parents.

·Take immediate and effective steps
to prevent the recruitment of children for the purposes of child trafficking
by, among other things, developing a protocol for identifying and pre-empting
potential child traffickers; disseminating information about child trafficking
to students, community and religious leaders and all personnel working for and
with children; giving priority attention to the expansion of educational and
vocational opportunities for children, especially girls; and targeting orphans
and children affected by HIV/AIDS as a vulnerable group in the context of child
trafficking.

·Intervene in the transport of
trafficked children by reinforcing border controls and establishing protocols
to identify and apprehend child traffickers. Monitor the application of these
protocols by, among other things, investigating any border guard alleged to
have accepted bribes from or charged "fees" to child traffickers. Station
officers not only at national borders but at transit points where trafficked
children are known to congregate before or after arriving at their country of
destination.

·Take immediate and effective steps
to address the commercial exploitation of trafficked children. Enact and
enforce specific regulations governing minimum age of employment, hours of
work, hazards unique to child labor such as use of dangerous equipment, forms
of labor likely to be injurious to children, corporal punishment, entitlement
to rest and leisure, and compensation. Take all appropriate law enforcement
measures against perpetrators of physical and/or sexual violence against child
domestic workers, and ensure care and support to children who have suffered
physical or sexual violence.

In addition to the
above, additional recommendations directed at all West African countries
implicated in the trafficking of children, to the government of Togo
specifically, to donors supporting West African governments, to the United
Nations, and to multilateral organizations in Africa can be found in Section
IX: Detailed Recommendations.

III. METHODS

This
report is based on a field mission to Togo by Human Rights Watch researchers in
April and May 2002. Human Rights Watch interviewed trafficked children in the
capital city, Lomé, as well as in twelve cities, villages and/or prefectures
within 500 kilometers of the capital: Vogan, Afanyagan, Tohoun, Sotouboua,
Tchamba, Sokodé, Bafilo, La Binah, Bassar, Tsévie, Hahatoe, and Est-Mono/Élavag
non. In Lomé we conducted interviews at an emergency shelter where several
trafficked children were staying, and in the offices of a women's rights NGO. We
spoke with a total of ninety children, of whom seventy-two would qualify as
having been trafficked under the legal definition in the U.N. Trafficking
Protocol. We also talked to prefects, village and canton chiefs, social
workers, police officers, gendarmes, teachers, parents, children, and other
citizens concerned and/or affected by child trafficking.[6]

Interviewees
were identified either through local authorities who were familiar with
specific cases of child trafficking, or through NGOs in Lomé and Tsévie that
were providing services to abused and neglected children. All of the children
interviewed had been released by their traffickers or had fled; this may have
excluded certain types of cases, such as those where escape was impossible.
Most children had already returned to their families by the time of the
interview, although many were still awaiting reintegration by NGOs or local
authorities. Some of the girls interviewed had recently escaped domestic labor
and were engaged in sex work in Lomé.

In
general, interviews were open-ended and covered a range of topics related to
the causes, elements and consequences of child trafficking. Either one or two
Human Rights Watch researchers conducted each interview, usually with the
assistance of an interpreter. Most interviews took place in Ewé, Kabyé or
Mina, local languages, with interpretation into either French or English.
Children were interviewed individually and assured of complete anonymity.
Child sex workers were, at their request, interviewed in the presence of a peer
counselor or outreach worker.

In
addition to interviews with children and local community members, Human Rights
Watch spoke with thirty-two governmental and nongovernmental experts in Togo,
including officials from Togo's Ministry of Social Affairs and National AIDS
Program, judges, foreign embassy representatives, directors and staff members
of child rights and AIDS service organizations, and U.N. officials. We also
reviewed numerous documents before and after the mission, including published
and unpublished studies, journalistic accounts and legal instruments.

For
the purposes of analysis, Human Rights Watch used the definition of child
trafficking found in the U.N. Trafficking Protocol: the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of any person under the age of
eighteen for the purposes of sexual or labor exploitation, forced labor, or
slavery.[7] We interpreted the key elements of this definition
to be the involvement of a trafficker, the movement of a child to a new
location, and the intent to exploit the child at some point in the process.[8] Although the concept of "exploitation" is not
defined under international law, we considered as exploitation any
non-consensual use of the child's labor for financial or other benefit,
including forced labor, slavery, practices similar to slavery, servitude, and
the worst forms of child labor as defined by the ILO.[9] A number of Human Rights Watch's witnesses would not
qualify as having been trafficked under the above definition, but their stories
provided insight into the context within which child trafficking occurs.

IV. BACKGROUND ON
CHILD TRAFFICKING IN TOGO

There is
trafficking because there are candidate children to be trafficked.

-A
jurist in Bafilo, May 2, 2002

A
coastal country of about 5.2 million people, Togo occupies a 54,390 square
kilometer strip of land between Ghana and Benin, with a small northern border
also with Burkina Faso. Independence from France was achieved in 1960. Togo's
current president, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, assumed power in a bloodless coup d'état
in 1967 and has ruled uninterrupted ever since. A lack of free and fair
elections in Togo has led to an almost complete withdrawal of development
assistance by both the United States and the European Union.[10] Unable to finance even basic services like health
and education,[11] Togo has been likened by one government official to
"a patient on an intravenous drip."[12]

Scale of Child
Trafficking

There
are no precise statistics on the number of children trafficked annually in West
Africa. A figure of 200,000 is often cited as a UNICEF estimate for West and
Central Africa, although a UNICEF official told Human Rights Watch that the
organization could not determine who initially provided the figure.[13] In 1999, UNICEF identified approximately twelve
routes along which children are trafficked in the region, and designated
thirteen countries of the region as "receiver," "provider," "receiver and
provider" and/or "transit/stop-over" states.[14] Two years later, in 2001, the International Labour
Organization's International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour
(ILO-IPEC) published a synthesis of nine country studies of child trafficking
in West Africa, concluding that trafficking routes flowed from countries and
regions with widespread poverty, low education levels and high birth rates to
those that are less populated and more developed.[15]

Togo,
which met the ILO's profile of a so-called sending state and was designated
principally as such, was also identified in the ILO-IPEC report as a
"receiving" and "transit" point as well as having a substantial internal trade
(i.e., within its own borders).[16] Official estimates of the number of Togolese
children directly affected by trafficking are derived from both the number of
children intercepted at Togo's borders and the number of children "rescued" and
repatriated from abroad. At a regional meeting on child trafficking in January
2002, the Togolese government representative, Suzanne Aho, reported that 297
children had been trafficked from Togo in 2001.[17] Aho later told Human Rights Watch, however, that the
number of cases of child trafficking recorded in 2001 was 261, as compared to
337 in 1999; in her view, the diminution may have resulted from more
traffickers escaping notice rather than from fewer actual cases.[18] These figures may be underestimates, as many of
Togo's trafficked children never come into contact with the authorities, and
the government lacks the resources to intercept children systematically.
Official estimates tend to be much lower than those put forth by ILO-IPEC, as
in 1999 when the government recorded 337 cases of child trafficking and
ILO-IPEC recorded over 800.[19]

Although
the UNICEF and ILO-IPEC reports did not trace the beginnings of child trafficking,
the Togo study concluded that the practice as currently defined had existed
"for at least ten years" in that country and had been growing rapidly since the
government and NGOs first began recording cases in the mid-1990s.[20] The study went on to associate child trafficking
with modern phenomena such as improved transport, increased demand for cheap
migrant labor, and increased poverty occasioned by such things as structural
adjustment programs and economic crisis in the mid-1990s.[21] At the same time, both the UNICEF and ILO-IPEC
reports clearly viewed child trafficking as an outgrowth of longstanding
practices such as labor migration and child labor. Noting, for example, that
"the people of central and western Africa have always migrated for economic
reasons," the ILO-IPEC report suggested that in some communities the
trafficking of children into neighboring countries followed the migratory
patterns of their parents.[22] Of ninety-six children interviewed for ILO-IPEC's
Togo study, most reported being trafficked into agricultural, domestic,
restaurant, or market work in Nigeria, Gabon or Côte d'Ivoire; in other
countries, children reported working in these sectors as well as in plantation
labor, diamond mining and sex work.[23]

The
Togolese trade first garnered international attention in 1999, when the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that two women had been stopped at the
Togo-Ghana border with seven children who had allegedly been handed to them by
their parents.[24] Two years later, the Nigerian-registered ship
Etireno left the city of Cotonou, Benin allegedly with 250 children from
Benin, Mali and Togo on board, bound for domestic service and other jobs in
Gabon. Though accounts of child slaves on board the Etireno were
exaggerated-authorities later confirmed that approximately twenty-three
children aged three to fourteen were onboard, only eight of them Togolese and
not all destined for child labor[25]-the incident marked a watershed in regional and
international efforts to combat child trafficking. Since the Etireno incident,
international media have documented the trafficking of Togolese girls into
domestic labor in Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon, and Congo.[26]

Causes of Child
Trafficking

Poverty and Lack of
Opportunity

Child
trafficking typically begins with a private arrangement between a trafficker
and a family member, one driven by the family's economic struggle and the
trafficker's desire for profit and cheap labor.[27] "Someone comes along and says he or she has
professions or jobs for the children, and the parents believe it," a village
chief in Vogan told Human Rights Watch. "But then the person puts them in
servitude or gives the child to someone else."[28] Human Rights Watch heard numerous accounts from
Togolese villagers of deceitful negotiations between parents and child
traffickers. "Parents think that in letting [children] go they're doing
something good for [them]," said one woman in Afanyagan, "but someone takes
them and makes them domestic workers, and someone else takes all the money
instead of giving them a salary."[29] A woman in Élavagnon added that traffickers "tell
the parents their child is doing well and getting paid, but they don't give
money to the kids and don't buy them anything."[30]

Asked
how many children had to be exploited before parents would catch on, villagers
were not optimistic. "When people are in poverty, they are desperate," said
one village chief in Vogan. He explained that when a child returns home
penniless, traffickers tell parents it was because the child was lazy. "Other
parents say, 'but my child is not lazy,' and they're ready to give another
child away."[31] In a 2002 study of 650 households by the NGO
Plan-Togo, parents of trafficked children were questioned about their family
background and the events leading up to their children being sent abroad.
Parents cited a variety of promises made by child traffickers, including formal
education or apprenticeships for their children, as well as employment in the
home or the commercial sector. A majority of households affected by child
trafficking were engaged in subsistence agriculture and could not afford to
send their children to school.[32]

According
to the director of UNICEF for West and Central Africa, poverty is a "major and
ubiquitous" causal factor behind child trafficking.[33] In those West African countries classified as
"sending" states-Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria and Burkina Faso-anywhere from 33
to 73 percent of the general population lives on less than U.S.$1 a day.[34] The ILO-IPEC study in 2001 of ninety-six trafficked
children also found that a large majority (87 percent) of trafficked children
came from families engaged in subsistence agriculture.[35] Of forty-five parents interviewed, 70 percent of
mothers and 60 percent of fathers had never attended school.[36] Some 74 percent of households studied were
polygamous. In addition, 82 percent of households surveyed had more than five
children.[37]

In
Togo, annual school fees range from 4,000 to 13,000 CFA (between U.S.$6 and
$20) despite a statutory guarantee of free primary education.[38] "Parents always say they can't afford school fees,"
a judge in Bafilo familiar with numerous cases of child trafficking told Human
Rights Watch. "They prefer that the child be with an uncle in Abidjan. The
complicity of parents in these cases is a shame."[39] In its 2001 global overview of child trafficking,
ILO-IPEC remarked that "[c]hildren with no access to education often have
little alternative but to look for work at a very early age."[40]

For
girls, trafficking is thought by some experts to build on a long tradition of
parents using their daughters as domestic workers rather than sending them to
school.[41] In 2002, girls in Togo were estimated to be 20
percent less likely than boys to be enrolled in primary school, 25 percent less
likely to reach high school and more than 50 percent less likely to enter
university.[42] In 1994, the NGO Anti-Slavery International (ASI)
and the Africa branch of the World Association of Orphans (WAO-Afrique)
observed that "[i]n Togo it has been found that parents prefer to send girls
rather than boys into domestic service, not only because household chores are
traditionally seen as 'women's work', but also because the girl's income helps
to support the schooling of her brothers."[43] Eight years later, in 2002, ASI suggested an
evolution from this tradition of child domestic labor to the modern practice of
child trafficking: "the process of recruitment is becoming more organised, as
agents and traffickers trawl rural areas offering incentives to parents," the
NGO noted. "The result is that more children and young people [in West Africa]
today are working in households in no way related to their own, often at
considerable distance."[44]

The Link to HIV/AIDS

Studies
have linked child trafficking to the breakdown of the family unit caused by
divorce or the death of a parent.[45] The ILO-IPEC 2001 study of child trafficking in Togo
found that of ninety-six trafficked children interviewed, almost 30 percent had
experienced the death of a mother, father or both parents.[46] A similar pattern was found in Cameroon, where 60
percent of 329 trafficked children belonged to single-parent families.[47] These data have led some researchers to posit a link
between child trafficking and HIV/AIDS, a rapidly growing cause of orphanhood
in sub-Saharan Africa.[48]

At
least 95,000 children under age fifteen have lost a mother or both parents to
AIDS in Togo; two thirds of those orphans were alive as of 1999.[49] A recent study of AIDS-affected families in Togo's
Maritime region, funded by the World Bank and implemented by the NGO CARE-Togo,
observed that children orphaned by AIDS spend less time in school because of an
inability to pay school fees, face prohibitions from attending public school
and, in some cases, withdraw from school entirely.[50] "NGOs report that some of these orphans have become
easy prey for child traffickers," the study noted.[51] Also noted was the potential for AIDS-affected
children to contract HIV and other sexually transmitted infections as a result
of child trafficking: "[a]ll in all, a vicious circle is created because these
children, left to their own resources without moral, financial or emotional
support, are vulnerable and susceptible of sinking into deliquency (theft,
drugs) and prostitution only to meet the same fate as their parents, that is to
die of AIDS."[52] Efforts to protect AIDS-affected children from
exploitation and abuse are often compromised by the deep stigma with which
these children live.[53]

Kodjo
Djissenou, executive director of the Togolese NGO La Conscience, told Human
Rights Watch there were three instances in which a child affected by AIDS could
be vulnerable to child trafficking in Togo: if abandoned following the death of
one or both parents; if forced to earn money to care for a sick or dying
parent; or if pressured to leave his or her village as a result of the stigma
associated with having AIDS in the family.[54] Other government, U.N. and NGO experts in Togo
elaborated on this point. Arsène Mensah, program coordinator of the NGO Aide
Médicale et de Charité, told Human Rights Watch that "[w]hen a parent has HIV,
the children automatically look to be able to do something to make money.
Someone offers them work in Abidjan, and they agree to go."[55] Gouna Yawo, a medical assistant and AIDS counselor
and president of the NGO Espoir-Vie Togo said that "[w]ith AIDS, there is often
an increase in poverty of the household.... [This] may mean
that AIDS-affected families will give up their children more easily."[56] Togo's leading government expert on child
trafficking, and Minister of Public Health, Promotio of Women and Child
Protection, Suzanne Aho, said, "[i]t could happen that there would be more
trafficking with an increase in AIDS and children orphaned by AIDS. Those
children are rejected and marginalized. Someone would only have to come and
propose to such a child something for him to do, and he'll follow."[57] AIDS orphans have been identified by ILO-IPEC's
representative in Togo, Essodina Abalo, as one of four groups most vulnerable to
child trafficking in Togo, the others being rural children, street kids and
young girls.[58]

Other Factors

In
addition to poverty, family breakdown and HIV/AIDS, experts have also
identified factors facilitating child trafficking-among them, porous borders
and lax regulatory environments, traditional migration patterns, ethnic
affinities, and inadequate information about trafficking and its risks.[59] These factors help to explain why economic pressures
do not lead to child trafficking in all cases of extreme poverty;[60] as Koffi Badjow Tcham, cabinet director of Togo's
Department for the Protection and Promotion of the Family and Children, told
Human Rights Watch, "there are places where people are very poor, but you don't
see this trafficking. There are regions where there is a very strong tendency
to migration, and those where there are traditions of sending children to stay
with uncles or aunts."[61]

Especially
conducive to child trafficking is the active or passive encouragement by border
patrols and other law enforcement agents. ILO-IPEC has noted that "customs
officials turn a blind eye" to trafficking in parts of West Africa,
particularly in routes through Cameroon and Nigeria.[62] A 2000 ASI study of child trafficking between Benin
and Gabon made the same point, documenting cases of traffickers giving money to
police to overcome the difficulty of crossing Gabon's borders.[63]

The
many forces at the root of child trafficking help to explain why Togo's efforts
to combat the practice have thus far been unsuccessful. Following the first
World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Stockholm,
Sweden in 1996, Togo developed a National Plan to Fight against Child Labor and
Child Trafficking, calling for the
creation of a database on traffickers; improved legislation to protect
children; exchanges of information on trafficking with Benin, Ghana, and
Burkina Faso; improved cooperation among police, customs and immigration
officers; improved educational opportunities for girls and street children;
awareness raising campaigns; and the rehabilitation and reintegration of
trafficked children.[64] While some of these measures have begun to be
implemented, the Togolese government has thus far been unable to infiltrate the
private arrangements between parents, children and child traffickers, much less
to address the social and economic circumstances at their root.

Trafficked Children
Interviewed in this Report

Human
Rights Watch interviewed forty-one girls and thirty-one boys who were
trafficked when they were between the ages of three and seventeen.[65] Of the girls, thirteen were trafficked
internally-that is, from one part of Togo to another-and twenty-four were
trafficked externally to Gabon, Benin, Nigeria or Niger. The remaining four
girls were trafficked to Togo from Benin, Nigeria or Ghana. All of the boys
were trafficked from the interior of Togo to parts of Nigeria, Benin or Côte
d'Ivoire. Ten of the seventy-two trafficked children were recruited and
transported from home but were intercepted before arriving at their
destination.

In
interviews with trafficked children, Human Rights Watch found a link between
lack of schooling and vulnerability to child trafficking. Though almost half
of the children interviewed were sixteen or older at the time of the interview,
few had attended secondary school, which is normally commenced at age fifteen.[66] (Among the general population, it was estimated in
1993 that 34 percent of boys and 12 percent of girls in Togo enrolled in
secondary school.)[67] In numerous cases, children said they were recruited
by traffickers after running out of money to pay for school. As one boy put
it, "I was in school and paying my own fees, but when I got to grade seven I
couldn't pay the fees anymore. It was 4,000 CFA [U.S.$6] per year. The
headmaster kept asking me to leave."[68] A father interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that
he had too little money to pay fees for his school-age children, so he had to
send one of them to Côte d'Ivoire:

I have four wives and
sixteen children. I am a farmer, and sometimes I distill sodabi.[69] Some of my children are older and married, but now I
have ten children living with me. Four are ready for school, and the others
are too young. I don't have enough money to look after my children. The main
reason my son had to go to Côte d'Ivoire was that I had no money to send him to
school.[70]

Despite a statutory guarantee
of free primary education in Togo, at least twelve trafficked children, both
boys and girls, told some version of this story-some of them forced to withdraw
from school during difficult economic times, others after the death of a
parent. "We had to leave school when our father died," said one child, whose
half-brother was reportedly trafficked at age seventeen. "Our mothers couldn't
pay the school fees."[71] Another, also orphaned at a young age, told Human
Rights Watch he "wanted to go to school but had nothing."[72]

Human
Rights Watch interviewed ten boys and eleven girls who said they were
trafficked following the death of one parent or both parents. One boy, now
seventeen, said he lost both of his parents by the time he was seven years old;another, fourteen, lost both his parents and
was subsequently trafficked to Nigeria three times. "I had no choice but to
go," he told Human Rights Watch. "I was not doing any work here, and things
were getting harder. I didn't tell my grandmother, because she would not have
accepted it. I had no other relatives to turn to-I have some uncles in Kara,
but they don't care about me."[73]
A sixteen-year-old girl said she was introduced to a trafficker by a friend
after her father reportedly died of a snake bite. Her mother ran away to
Burkina Faso, leaving behind nine children. "I didn't tell my brothers," she
said. "I knew they would say that I was just reacting to a bad situation and
that they could take care of me if I stayed. I wanted to surprise them by
coming back with money and skills."[74]
Asked about the principal causes of orphanhood in Togo, N'Bighe N'Faba, the
prefect of La Binah, told Human Rights Watch "[t]here are some orphans from
HIV/AIDS, but also from malaria, snake bites, mothers who die in childbirth,
and just the tradition of not going to the hospital in time or the shortage of
medicines."[75]

In
Tchamba, Human Rights Watch documented one case of a child being trafficked
after her father had died of AIDS. Hodalo S., who was in primary school when
her father became ill, told Human Rights Watch she was sent by her grandmother
to live with an aunt,[76]
who then took her to Gabon to work. For a month she sold milk in the market
without pay, and by the time she returned home her father had died.[77]
Human Rights Watch interviewed a social worker familiar with this case, and he
said the health worker who cared for Hodalo's father confirmed the diagnosis of
HIV/AIDS. In other instances, orphans who were recruited by child traffickers
were unable to identify their parents' cause of death.

As
in the ILO-IPEC study, Human Rights Watch found significant differences in the
experiences of trafficked girls as compared to trafficked boys. While most
girls interviewed reported working in domestic or market labor, boys reported
working in agriculture and, in one case, in a furniture factory. In addition,
whereas a number of girls said they were trafficked within Togo, all of the
boys reported having been trafficked from Togo to other countries. Finally,
while most girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch fled their traffickers
following prolonged periods of physical and mental abuse, most boys were released
after a period of time and told to find their way home to Togo. The
experiences of Human Rights Watch's witnesses are described in greater detail
in the two following chapters: girls trafficked both internally and externally
into domestic and market labor, followed by boys trafficked externally into
agricultural or factory labor.

CASE
STUDY: DÉLA N., AGE FOURTEEN

Déla
N. is from a small village in Togo not far from the border of Benin. Her
mother is a farmer, and she has not seen her father since her parents divorced
many years ago. She has never been to school.

When
she was eight years old, Déla was invited by an aunt to go live in Nigeria.
Her aunt told her she would be staying with her and helping around the house.
Her mother said she should go.

Déla
stayed with her aunt for six years, doing housework and helping her aunt in the
market. She prepared food for her aunt's children, cleaned the house and
helped her aunt sell merchandise in the market. She was not allowed to play
with the children.

After
a short time, Déla's aunt returned to Togo and then came back to Nigeria with
some other girls. The other girls were all older than Déla and could do work
that she couldn't. Her aunt became impatient with her and starting beating
her. She shouted at her that she was lazy, and sometimes she beat her with a
stick. When the other girls got money for their work, Déla didn't get
anything.

One
day, after coming home from the market, Déla was caught playing with her aunt's
children. Her aunt became furious and started beating her badly. That day
Déla decided to steal 800 naira (U.S.$7) from her aunt and run away.

On
the street, an older man asked Déla where she was going and whether he could
help. He gave her 2,000 CFA (U.S.$3), which she used to take a lorry to the
border of Benin and Togo. At the border, Déla met another man making tea on
the roadside. The man invited her to stay with him for a day and said he would
take her back to her village. She stayed with him for two days, but he still
didn't take her back. After being pressured by others, the man eventually
brought her to the police.

Déla
is now staying at the Oasis Center, a shelter for abused, neglected and
abandoned children in Lomé. The staff of the Oasis Center are providing her
with psychological counseling and trying to locate her mother.

V. GIRLS TRAFFICKED INTO DOMESTIC AND MARKET LABOR

Human
Rights Watch interviewed forty-one girls who said they were trafficked to, from
or within Togo to work as housemaids or market vendors. Girls' descriptions of
being recruited, transported, received and exploited revealed a pattern of
abuse resembling child slavery.[78] They reported being handed over by their parents to
known or unknown intermediaries, sometimes for a price, and told they would be
receiving formal education, professional training or paid work abroad. When
they arrived, sometimes after life-threatening sea journeys, they were housed
with employers who ordered them to perform housework and to assist with
commercial enterprises. Girls worked long hours without breaks or holidays, in
some cases staying up all night to work after having already worked a full
day. Few received any remuneration for their services. Numerous girls
recounted incidents of intimidation and physical abuse, sometimes leading to
permanent injury. Those who fled their employers sought shelter on the street,
at police stations or with local NGOs; in some cases, they resorted to sex work
at the suggestion of friends. While most were in the custody of their parents
at the time of their interview, it is estimated that thousands of Togolese
girls are still working abroad in the houses and markets of various West
African countries.[79]

Recruitment

In
cases documented by Human Rights Watch, the trafficking of girls began with the
recruitment of a child by either an eventual employer or a third-party
intermediary. Most girls recalled being approached by a stranger, usually a
woman, who came to their villages for the purpose of recruiting domestic workers.
One child described her trafficker simply as "a woman who came to the village
looking for children."[80] Others described their trafficker as "a woman who
had been living in Nigeria and knew some of my friends,"[81] or "someone I knew but not very well."[82] A fourteen-year-old girl from Bassar, who never made
it abroad because her boat to Gabon capsized, told Human Rights Watch that
"someone came and offered me money to work in Gabon, and I
accepted.... I didn't know the person; it was a woman, and
my parents didn't know her either."[83]

Although
the actual recruitment was usually carried out by a stranger, most girls
recalled some degree of parental involvement in the transaction-ranging from
parents accepting money from traffickers to parents authorizing traffickers to
take their children on the understanding the children would be educated
abroad. Kéméyao A., age ten, told Human Rights Watch her mother accepted money
from a woman looking for domestic servants:

There was a woman who
came to the market to buy charcoal. She found me and told my mother about a
woman in Lomé who was looking for a girl like me to stay with her and do
domestic work. She came to my mother, and my mother gave me away. The woman
gave my mother some money, but I don't know how much.[84]

According
to the girls interviewed, details such as how long they would be staying
abroad, how much they would get paid or where they would be staying were rarely
worked out before their departure. One mother told Human Rights Watch she sent
her four-year-old daughter abroad without any clear idea of what she would be
doing. "I was told she would be helping to sell candy," she said. "I wasn't
sure how a four-year-old could help, but the woman said she needed help."[85]

In
cases where traffickers did not offer money, they reportedly promised to
provide what parents could not themselves afford for their daughters: an
education, some vocational training, or the basic necessities of life. "My
aunt arrived at my father's funeral," said one child, employed as a housemaid
in Lomé from age three to sixteen, "and afterward she told my mother she would
bring me to Lomé and put me in school."[86] Another child, in training to become a hairdresser,
told Human Rights Watch she was offered the chance to finish her studies in
Gabon. "[A woman] told me that she knew of opportunities outside of Togo and
she could take me somewhere to finish my course, and then I could set up a
shop," she said.[87] In other cases, the trafficker reportedly promised
only a job. "She never asked for any money," one girl recalled. "She just
said that if I went with her I would make money to send to my parents."[88]

In
some cases, parents or relatives reportedly paid an intermediary to find work
for a child. "I have a sister in Gabon who said I should go work there," said
one girl, who said she could not afford to go to school. "She gave some money
to a woman to come and bring me to Gabon."[89] The girl ended up being one of several girls who
boarded a boat in Nigeria which capsized in open seas. Another girl said she
was told by a stranger that her sister was expecting her: "a man arrived and
said he had been given money by my sister," she said. "I wanted to go with
him. He came back a week later and took me to Nigeria in a car."[90]

Though
their expectations differed, many girls spoke of having been scared at the
thought of being sent abroad to work. Kafui A., age thirteen, was only eleven
when her mother told her she would be going to Lomé to work as a housemaid. "I
didn't want to go," she told Human Rights Watch. "I knew that when people
brought children there, they mistreated them. My mother told me I would be
going to stay with a relative and she would not mistreat me."[91] The issue of whether parents colluded with child
traffickers appeared to be sensitive for some girls. One girl broke down and
cried, exclaiming that she "could not believe how my parents neglected me."[92] Akosiwa H., reportedly trafficked into domestic
labor when she was only three years old, told Human Rights Watch she confronted
her mother after eleven years of working abroad. Now in the care of an NGO in
Lomé, Akosiwa said that "I didn't see my mother for eleven years, until she
came here last Tuesday. I asked her how she could send me to Lomé when I was
three years old. I asked how she could completely forget about me for eleven
years, how she could just abandon me like that. She didn't say anything."[93]

Government
and NGO representatives in Togo had varying views about parents' degree of
culpability in such situations. The director of cabinet of Togo's Department
for the Protection and Promotion of the Family and Children, Koffi Badjow
Tcham, suggested that some parents knowingly authorize the trafficking of their
children. "It does happen that parents in all knowledge of what's happening
will accept ridiculously small amounts of money to give up their children,"
Tcham told Human Rights Watch. "They unload their children in that way. The
government has taken measures to ensure that this kind of action will be severely
punished."[94] A villager in Afanyagan qualified this statement.
"Some [parents] are badly intentioned, and they actually want to commercialize
their children," he said, "and some think that in letting them go they're doing
something good for their children."[95]

Transport

Girls
who were trafficked outside of Togo had particularly harrowing stories to tell,
especially those who had faced a sea journey to Gabon. Dansi D., age sixteen,
told Human Rights Watch she spent three days on a boat to Gabon, before working
as a housemaid there for eighteen months. She said her journey began in the
village of Nungbani in Togo, where she and seven other girls boarded a minibus
with a woman who said they would be looking after small children in Gabon. The
bus drove as far as Lomé, stopped there for five days and then made a one-day
journey to Nigeria. Although Dansi was not able to recall where in Nigeria she
was, known transit points for children trafficked from Togo to Gabon include
Port Harcourt, Oron and Calabar, cities and towns in southeastern Nigeria close
to the coast.[96]

When
she arrived in Nigeria, Dansi was abandoned by the woman who brought her and
told to wait to be collected by a boat. "I stayed in Nigeria for five months,"
Dansi told Human Rights Watch. "It was a big house with not many people in it,
and [the woman] told me just to wait. I ate gari[97]
from the stock [she] had left. After five months, a man came and took me to a
boat."[98]
Dansi went on to describe the journey from Nigeria to Gabon. "On the boat,
there were over a hundred children, Togolese and Nigerian, and there were some
adults, but more children than adults," she said. "I talked to some of them,
and all the girls were going to Gabon to work. It took three days on the boat
to get to Gabon. They gave us gari and cassava and sometimes bread to
eat."[99]

Other
stories were similar. Girls told Human Rights Watch that, after being
recruited in their villages, they were driven to meeting places in Nigeria
where they were told to wait for a boat to arrive. The journey to Nigeria
lasted about a day, with some traffickers stopping along the way to pick up
other recruits. "We went from Kabou to Sokodé and changed vehicles there," one
girl said. "Some other girls joined us in Sokodé, I don't remember how many."[100]
When they arrived in Nigeria, girls were brought to small towns and left to
their own devices. They reported waiting up to two months with nothing to eat
and nowhere to stay. Some slept outside; others slept in abandoned buildings.
All had to scrounge for food or steal from the local market. "We waited for
two months with nothing to do," one girl said. "We would fight and hit each
other. We did not have enough food to eat, so we would steal manioc from the
market and get beaten by the shopkeeper."[101]

Birgit
Schwarz, a German journalist who interviewed several trafficked children in
Togo, told Human Rights Watch she interviewed girls who, while waiting for
their boat to arrive, were raped, prostituted themselves, and sold their belongings
to survive.[102]
All were reportedly abandoned by their intermediaries, the women who promised
not only to accompany them to Gabon but to find them work or send them to
school.

Girls
recalled that after a period in Nigeria, boats arrived and helmsmen directed
them onboard. They described the boats as wooden barks lacking any
navigational equipment or sanitation facilities.[103]
"There were no toilets," one said. "There were girls defecating on each other
and vomiting in the boat. It was impossible to vomit into the sea without
falling in."[104]
One girl told Human Rights Watch she felt sick and had no medicine; another
said she had nothing to eat and no clean water for four days. Journalist
Birgit Schwarz corroborated these accounts from her own research among
trafficked girls, describing the conditions as "awful." "Helmsmen lose their
course in the middle of the night and get lost, and there is not even clean
water to drink," Schwarz told Human Rights Watch. "The girls are all sick by
the time they get to Gabon."[105]

According
to Nigeria's This Day newspaper, trafficked girls disembark at such
points in Gabon as Cocobeach, Cap Esterias, Pont Nomba, Owendo, and Ouloumi.[106]
"They wind up sputtering to shore," Suzanne Aho told Human Rights Watch.
"Boats can't go up to the coast so they leave the children off the coast in the
water. Many can't swim."[107]

Many
girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they did not make it as far as
Gabon. "We got close to Cameroon, but the waves were too strong," one girl recalled.
"The boat tipped and nine girls died."[108]
Human Rights Watch corroborated this account with nine other survivors of the
same incident; the tragedy was also reported by the BBC, which stated that
sixty-eight "child slaves" had been rescued from a sinking ship.[109]
When asked about this incident, Aho said that at least eight children had died.[110]
A recent story in Nigeria's This Day newspaper reported that about 20
percent of children bound for Gabon from Nigeria die in open seas due to boat
mishaps, about 150 children in 2001 alone.[111]
This is probably an understatement: according to the U.S. State Department, the
Togolese government reported 700 drownings of trafficked children, half of them
Togolese, in two separate incidents in March 2001.[112]
"These mishaps are caused by the fact that the boats that freight the children
are tiny old rickety wooden boats with two old outboard and forty horsepower
engines," This Day said. "[T]he boats are overloaded with goods and
people without any life jacket or navigational facility."[113]

While
the sea journey to Gabon is clearly the most dangerous journey faced by
trafficked children interviewed by Human Rights Watch, others who left Togo
also had unpleasant experiences. Human Rights Watch interviewed girls who
traveled overland from the interior of Togo to Lomé, Nigeria or Niger.
Massoglé G., introduced to a trafficker at age sixteen by her friends, said she
was trafficked from Bassar, a city in Togo's northern region of Kara, to
Niger. "A woman said she would pay for my trip abroad and then I could work it
off and pay her back," she said. "So we went to Niger. I went in a car as far
as Kara, and then we met a bus with about twenty girls in it, most older than
me but some younger. It took two and a half days to get to Niger. The trip
was terrible-we had no food the whole time."[114]
While Kara was a popular transit point for girls with northern destinations,
most girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they passed through Lomé
before going to Benin, Nigeria or Gabon. Bébé M. said her would-be trafficker
promised to pick her up at a bus station in Lomé but abandoned her there. "The
bus [to Lomé] took one hour, and I bought my ticket with money I made from
selling oranges and kerosene," she recalled.[115]
"I waited one and a half hours, but she never came. I went home and never
tried going again."[116]

Girls
trafficked from one point in Togo to another reported taking public
transportation or being driven by their traffickers in a car or van. According
to the ILO-IPEC country report, the bus stations of Kara, Bassar and Sokodé are
known to be assembly points for children coming from Togo's Central region,
while those of Anié and Bagou are assembly points for children from the Plateau
region. The ILO-IPEC report also noted that in addition to Lomé, destination
cities in Togo for trafficked children include Kara, Atakpamé and Sokodé,
respectively the capitals of the Kara, Central and Plateau regions.[117]

Receipt and
Exploitation

At
the end of their journey, girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch performed
long periods of domestic and market labor during which they received little to
no remuneration and often experienced beatings and mental abuse. The trade in
Togolese girls was particularly extensive in Gabon, a relatively wealthy
country with a small population and consequently a labor shortage, and where
compulsory schooling and strict child labor laws fuel a growing demand for
foreign child labor. Although Gabonese law prohibits trafficking in
foreign child labor, implementation of this law is limited to periodic
round-ups of trafficked children and their repatriation to the embassy
concerned.[118] A 1998-1999 survey of 600 working children in Gabon
found that only seventeen of them were Gabonese.[119] Two years later, in 2001, the NGO WAO-Afrique
estimated that there were between 10,000 and 15,000 trafficked Togolese
children working in Gabon.[120] Commenting on the number of trafficked girls working
as housemaids in Gabon, ASI noted in 2000 that Gabon "inevitably has become a
great consumer of them and has created a need to use them."[121]

In
terms of work performed, the ASI study noted that girls trafficked to Gabon are
employed either by Beninese or Togolese nationals who trade in various
merchandise, or by Gabonese families who need a cheap domestic workforce for
housework. In the latter case, any salary paid by the girl's host family, on
average 50,000 CFA (U.S.$76) per month, is reportedly paid to the child's
trafficker.[122] ASI cited the case of one trafficker who collected the
salary of twelve different girls every month.[123] According to ILO-IPEC, some host families include
foreign nationals who have obtained Gabonese citizenship but continue to use
their former compatriots as intermediaries for recruiting child labor.[124]

Girls
interviewed by Human Rights Watch recalled that upon arriving at their
destinations (either within Togo, or in Benin, Niger, Nigeria or Gabon) they
either began working for the intermediaries who had transported them or were
deposited with a family they had never met before. In either case, they were
ordered to perform domestic or market work. Most recalled waking up very early
to do housework and spending the day assisting their bosses with small
commercial enterprises-selling bread, fruit or milk in the market, grilling
skewers of meat on the roadside, or working in a small boutique. At the end of
the day, they returned to their bosses' homes and did more housework before
bed. One described a typical day as follows:

In the morning I went
to the market with my aunt. She sold cloth and I sold rags. I walked around
and sold them for 100 CFA [about U.S.15¢]-I would make 900 to 1,000 CFA per day
[about U.S.$1.50] and give the money to her. I came home at 6:00 p.m. and made
the fire, cleaned the house and put water on the fire. My aunt always told me
to be a good girl, not to steal anything from her. She said if I stole
anything she would beat me.[125]

A
girl trafficked to Gabon when she was seven said that in addition to working as
a housemaid she tended a tomato and pepper garden for five years.[126] Another said she carried yams and pineapples on her
head at the age of nine. She said she worked in the market all day and then
"slept in the store room, with the yams and pineapples."[127] Two other girls, Afi A. and Ama D., said they were
brought to Anié, Togo by an aunt and deposited at the home of the aunt's
daughter; they described their duties:

We sold bread in the
market, going around from 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning until
night.... When we got home, our aunt's daughter gave us the
flour for the next day's bread. She showed us how to make the bread, and we
did it with her and two other girls. She was not nice to us. If we didn't
sell all the bread in one day, she would beat us with a stick.[128]

Afi and Ama said they baked
bread every night until the early hours of the morning. Asked whether they had
to work near the oven, Ama said that "the oven would burn our feet. Once I
thought the grill was out so I walked on it and got burned." One day, she and Afi
ran into the aunt who had brought them to Anié in the first place. "We told
her her daughter was treating us badly," Ama said, "and all she said was, 'What
do you mean? You didn't come to Anié to play but to work.'"[129]

Some
girls described their day job as "pounding fufu"-an onerous chore in
which a large mortar and pestle is used to mash yams or cassava vigorously into
a doughy paste to be served with fish, meat or vegetables. "I had to pound fufu
from 3:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night," one girl told Human Rights
Watch. "I hated it-it was hard and painful work. If I lost any of the yam in
the pounding, the woman beat me-slapped me with her hand."[130] Another girl said she was unable to continue
pounding after a while. "[W]hen I got there, I had to pound fufu from
4:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night," she said. "After a while, I told the
woman I couldn't stand it. She never gave me any money, and I said that if she
didn't pay me, I would just go back. So she let me sell rice in the market."[131]

The
domestic work described by trafficked children also varied. Girls as young as
eight years old said they were told to wash the dishes, sweep floors and
prepare food. "My aunt told me I didn't wash the dishes well, so she beat me
and insulted me," said one child, trafficked to Lomé when she was less than
eight years old.[132] Assoupi H., sixteen, trafficked when she was only
three, said she was told to carry her aunt's infant. "She told my mother she
would put me in school," Assoupi said, "but she gave birth to twins and told me
I had to help her look after the children until they were old enough for
school. I was only three years old, but I carried her babies and held them for
her."[133] By the time her children reached school age,
Assoupi's aunt was pregnant with twins again. "She asked me to take care of
them, too," Assoupi recalled. "I had to fetch water for the house, sweep, wash
the dishes and wash clothes. I would bathe the children, cook for them and
wash their clothes. When they were young, they cried a lot."[134]

Of
forty-one girls interviewed, hardly any recalled receiving any remuneration for
their services: one recalled earning 12,000 CFA (U.S.$18) for three months'
work in a boutique in Benin, and another earned 48,000 CFA (U.S.$70) for six
months' work in a market in Nigeria.[135] In other cases, traffickers apparently found ways to
avoid payment. One child said her trafficker promised to send her 25,000 CFA
(U.S.$37) after she got home, but said she never received the money.[136] Another said she was included by her trafficker in a
tontine-a pool of funds into which people contribute small amounts and
from which they can periodically withdraw-but never allowed to withdraw.[137] Several children said their traffickers paid for
their travel abroad, only to order them to work off the debt.[138] For the most part, however, girls said they were
expected to give all of their earnings to their bosses and to be grateful for
having a place to stay. "People like my aunt bring girls to work them like
slaves or to sell them," said one girl, now nineteen. "They bring girls there
to treat badly but they always take good care of their own children."[139]

Exposure to Abuse

"In
the beginning my auntie was nice to me, but then she changed," Assoupi H., told
Human Rights Watch. "Any time I did something wrong, she would shout at me and
insult me. Sometimes she would tell her friends what I had done, and they
would come over and beat me.... She would curse me and say I
had no future."[140] After eleven years of domestic labor, Assoupi said
she was attacked by her aunt's husband:

One night my auntie's
husband came home from work and asked me if I had prepared food for him and the
children. I said no. He said, "Your aunt gave you money, why didn't you make
the food?" I tried to explain, but he jumped on me and started beating me. He
dragged me out of the house and told me to go away. That night I came back and
went to sleep, and the next day my aunt came home. Her children told her that
their father had beaten me. Nobody would speak to me after that, so I felt I
had to leave.[141]

Assoupi's
story is far from unique. A majority of trafficked girls interviewed by Human
Rights Watch recounted incidents of physical abuse, often repeated abuse.
Girls told of being struck with blunt objects and electric wire, and threatened
with punishment and sometimes death; beatings were carried out not just by
bosses but by others such as neighbors. Human Rights Watch interviews at the
Oasis Center of the NGO Terre des Hommes, which houses abused, abandoned and
neglected children in Lomé, produced several accounts of girls enduring
repeated abuse and then escaping after an incident of abuse beyond endurance:

·Kéméyao A., age ten, said she went
to do domestic and market work in Lomé in 2001. She said her mother accepted
money from a woman in the market whose sister was looking for a domestic. The
sister treated Kéméyao "very badly." "It was a long distance from the market
to her house," Kéméyao recalled, "so at the end of the day she took a
motorcycle home and made me walk. Often I got home late, and she beat me for
not walking quickly enough. She had a special stick for slapping my palms.
Sometimes she used her hands, or grabbed a stick and beat me all over my body.
I would cry and call for my mother, and she would say, 'What will your mother
do? You will never go to your mother.'" One morning, Kéméyao's employer woke
up after coming home drunk and asked her to heat some soup. "The soup had to
be kept warm so it wouldn't spoil," she said, "but it hadn't been properly
warmed. My auntie realized it had lost its taste, so she started beating me
for not heating it up properly. That day I decided to leave."[142]

·When Kafui A. was eleven, she was
taken to Lomé by a woman she said she had never met before. She said the woman
had her sell second-hand clothes in the market and woke her up at 4:00 every
morning to do housework. "When she called me and I didn't hear her, she would
send her son to get me, and when I came he would kick me and beat me on the
head and ask me if I was deaf," Kafui said. One day, she recalled, some other
children were going to the well to fetch water so she brought along two pails
to fill up. "I couldn't carry both pails," she said, "so I carried one and
came back for the other one. When I got to the house the second time, my
auntie asked me what had taken so long. I tried to explain, but she didn't
understand. She said that if I didn't tell her where I had been, she would
beat me to death. She threatened me and said that I was lying, that I had
really gone to visit one of my relatives. She started beating me and told me
to go outside and clean her daughter's toilet." Kafui A. continued: "When I
came back she had locked the door. I knocked and no one answered, so I went to
stay at the miller's house. When I came back to her house in the morning, she
had already gone to the market, so I decided to run away."[143]

Sexual Exploitation
and Exposure to HIV/AIDS and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases

Trafficked
girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch described a number of situations in
which they faced a potentially high risk of sexual exploitation: in transit if
they were abandoned (as in Nigeria) and left without care; in domestic labor if
they were physically abused and forced to sleep in the same rooms as men or
boys; and during return or repatriation if they were forced to live in the
street and risk abuse, including sexual abuse, from civilians or police
officers.

A
few of the girls interviewed by Human Rights Watch recounted a chain of events
that began with trafficking and ended with sex work. Human Rights Watch
interviewed ten child sex workers in Dekon, a neighborhood in central Lomé
known locally as the marché du petit vagin (literally, "market of the
small vagina").[144] Of them, at least three had been recruited,
transported or received in Lomé for the purpose of labor exploitation,
consistent with the legal definition of child trafficking: Each of these girls
recounted arriving in Lomé to work as a housemaid or in the market, having been
offered a job or an education by a relative, family friend or stranger. Their
entry into sex work apparently began when, after enduring conditions of
exploitation or abuse, they took to the streets and found themselves needing
money.[145]

·Seventeen-year-old Vodou K., from
Tsévie, Togo, said her father left for Ghana when she was very young, and her
mother died when she was fifteen. She told Human Rights Watch that an elderly
woman approached her at her mother's funeral and said she should come to Lomé
and work as a housemaid. She agreed, but after four months of work her boss
abandoned her and told her to go back home. She then went to stay with a
friend who was a sex worker, and her friend convinced her to try sex work. At the
time of her interview, Vodou K. said she had been in sex work for a year.
Though she said she made about 3,000-5,000 CFA (U.S.$4.50-$7.50) per night at
first, she now makes only about 1,000 CFA (U.S.$1.50) per night. She said that
on the advice of outreach workers, she always asks her clients to use condoms;
however, interviews with other child sex workers cast doubt on girls' actual
condom use.[146]

·Alaba M., age nineteen, is from
Nigeria. She told Human Rights Watch she was seven when both of her parents
died and her aunt brought her to Togo. When she arrived, she said, she stayed
with her aunt in a suburb of Lomé and helped her in the market. She recalled
selling bread while her aunt sold cigarettes and soda. She never went to
school. She said her aunt's children were very cruel to her, making her carry
their bags home from the market, ordering her to do their work, beating her,
and teasing her for being an orphan and a servant. After eight years, she
finally left and went to stay with one of her aunt's daughters. She said she
then met a girl who had beautiful clothes and asked her where she got them.
The girl suggested she try sex work. Alaba had been working as a sex worker in
Dekon for a month at the time of her interview with Human Rights Watch. She
said she insists on condom use, but sometimes clients offer her 10,000 CFA
(U.S.$15) for unprotected sex.[147]

·Seventeen-year-old Sefako K., from
Aneho, told Human Rights Watch that her mother died about a year previously.
She said her mother had been growing very thin, and that she was told by her
grandmother that her mother was bewitched. She recalled a woman approaching
her and asking her if she wanted to make some money in Lomé. The woman brought
her to another woman who sold rice in Dekon, and she was offered a room and 200
CFA (U.S.30¢) per day to wash dishes. Although the money was reportedly
deposited into a tontine on her behalf, she said she was never allowed
to withdraw. She decided to go live with a boyfriend, whom she then left to
live with a girlfriend. She said her girlfriend was doing sex work and
suggested she start going out with her. She now makes about 1,000-1,500 CFA
(U.S.$1.50-$2.25) per night as a sex worker. Once, she said, a man offered her
6,000 CFA (U.S.$9) to have sex without a condom and she said yes.[148]

Girls
who engage in sex work face heightened risk of HIV infection. A 1992 study of
sex workers in Lomé reported that nearly 80 percent of the women tested were
HIV-positive.[149] While there are no official estimates of condom use
or condom availability among this population, informal interviews with
twenty-seven child sex workers in Dekon by the NGO Population Services
International (PSI) revealed that condom use was "virtually nil."[150] In interviews with Human Rights Watch, most child
sex workers said they did not make their clients use condoms at first, but they
did now because of the efforts of outreach workers.[151] In addition, some girls said clients continued to
offer them extra money to forgo condom use, and that sometimes they welcomed
the extra income. Nineteen-year-old Efua S., who came to Lomé from Ghana,
added that fears of violence made it difficult to insist on condom use. "If I
don't pay my rent, they beat me up," she told Human Rights Watch. "I try to
use condoms, but sometimes the clients get rough. Three days ago, some guy
invited me to his house, and when I got there there was a group of men wanting
to sleep with me, one after another. I had to run away."[152]

According
to one villager in Afanyagan, the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS is particularly
high for children trafficked to Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte
d'Ivoire. "Ask children where AIDS comes from, and they'll tell you
'Abidjan,'" the villager told Human Rights Watch. "They call the people who
have come back from Abidjan 'not yet symptomatic.' That's why now no one wants
his or her child to go to Côte d'Ivoire."[153]

In
addition to girls who find themselves driven into sex work once they leave
their homes, girls trafficked into other forms of labor may also find
themselves at risk of (noncommercial) sexual abuse. Trafficked girls who work
as housemaids, in particular, may be exposed to sexual abuse in the household.
Some of Human Rights Watch's witnesses reported staying in the same bedrooms as
older boys or men from their employer's family or family acquaintances; others
recalled boarders renting rooms from their employers. "There were a man and a
boy there," said one girl, trafficked at age seven. "I was afraid the boy
would rape me."[154]

Girls
also faced situations of vulnerability to sexual abuse when, after leaving
places to which they were trafficked, they were offered assistance by male
strangers. Some such assistance was clearly well intentioned (see below, under
"return"), but the risk to girls is obvious. Amina Kodjovi-Numado, director of
Terre des Hommes' Oasis Center, told Human Rights Watch that between January
and May 2002, approximately twelve children arrived at the Oasis Center saying
they had been sexually abused. "The sexual abuse cases are quite numerous,"
agreed Professor Djassoa Gnansa, a psychologist who counsels children at the
Oasis Center. "Girls can be cornered in a bedroom. Sometimes someone abuses
their kindness-they say, 'bring me a cigarette, bring me water' and then they
corner them."[155] Suzanne Aho recalled thirty-seven cases of sexual
abuse against trafficked girls in the past year; she told Human Rights Watch
that "some of the girls who come back are [HIV] positive."[156] Kodjovi-Numado told Human Rights Watch that Terre
des Hommes administers an HIV test to every girl who says she has been sexually
abused and whose parents cannot be located.[157]

Return

Girls
interviewed by Human Rights Watch recounted spending anywhere from three months
to nine years in their city or country of destination, after which they either
fled or left with their employer's permission. As described above, many
recounted fleeing after an incident of physical abuse.

When
asked to describe their return home, girls reported coming under the protection
of Togo's repatriation and reintegration procedures (these are detailed in
Section VII: State Response), and of spending time in local police stations, in
the offices of the Department of Social Affairs, and/or in NGO-operated
shelters such as Terre des Hommes' Oasis Center in Lomé. Some who had been
trafficked to a foreign country said they spent time in the Togolese embassy
before being flown back to Togo. One child recalled her trafficker having to
pay for her airfare back to Togo, a requirement that journalist Birgit Schwarz
found to be common in her interviews with trafficked girls.[158] According to Schwarz, who accompanied several girls
on a flight from Gabon to Togo after they were found in Libreville, Gabon, and
brought to the Togolese embassy repatriated children were typically met at the
airport and photographed by a representative from the Ministry of Social
Affairs.[159]

Other,
less fortunate girls described falling through the cracks of the reintegration
process. They recounted spending nights in the street, knocking on the doors
of churches and accepting the kindness of strangers. One child told Human
Rights Watch she accepted a ride from a Nigerian driver who dropped her on the
side of the road long before reaching her village.[160] Another said that, at the age of fifteen, she agreed
to marry someone in exchange for being taken back to Togo. "I was desperate,"
she said, "so I said yes just to get out. Now my brothers are working hard in
the fields to pay off that boy so I don't have to marry him."[161]

Déla
N. described for Human Rights Watch how she made it all the way from Nigeria to
Togo before the police intervened:

I met a man I knew and
he asked me why I was leaving. I didn't say anything, only that I was going
back to my mother. He gave me 2,000 CFA [U.S.$3] and gave me directions
telling me how to get home. I spent 300 naira [U.S.$2.50] on a truck to the
Benin border. There I took a car to the border of Togo and Benin. When I
arrived it was nighttime, so I had to sleep there. It cost fifty CFA [U.S.7¢]
to sleep [at an inn], and the next day I discovered my money was stolen.[162]

After arriving in Togo, Déla
said she was invited into the home of an older, male stranger:

I met a man making tea
on the roadside-he called me, I went over, and he asked me what happened. I
told him everything. He asked me to stay with him for the following day and
said he would take me to my house. I went to his house on Saturday and stayed
there Saturday and Sunday. He promised he would take me to my village. He
asked some people if he should do this, and they said it wasn't the right thing
to do, that it would be better to bring me to the police. He brought me there,
and they brought me home.[163]

A similar experience
was recounted by Afi A. and Ama D., the two girls trafficked to Anié to bake
and sell bread. After selling 1,500 CFA (about U.S.$2.25) worth of bread one
day, they took that money and escaped by paying a bus driver to take them back
to Sirka, their home village. Midway through the journey, however, the driver
reportedly told them that 1,500 CFA was not enough and dropped them on the side
of the road. They said a stranger found them and took them to officials from
Social Affairs in Sotouboua, and from there they were taken to Sokodé. Social
Affairs found temporary housing for them in Sokodé for two nights, after which
they said they were brought to Kara to await their parents.

In
one case documented by Human Rights Watch, a girl said she was intercepted by
police at the border and placed in juvenile detention for five days, a practice
that Judge Emanuel Edorh, chief magistrate of Togo's children's court, insisted
he did not authorize.[164] "The police stopped us at the border and asked where
we were going," the girl said. "First they took me to the lock-up, and I was
there for one night with three other girls and two women. After one night,
they took me to the detention center where I was questioned. I was there for
five nights, and then Terre des Hommes came and took me back to the village."[165]

Girls Trafficked to
Togo from Other Countries

Although
Togo is principally a "sending" state with respect to child trafficking, Human
Rights Watch interviewed some girls who were trafficked to Togo from Ghana or
Nigeria. The precise extent of child trafficking to Togo is not known,
although ILO-IPEC notes that most children who are trafficked to Togo come from
the Mono region in Benin and the Volta region in Ghana. The ILO-IPEC report
does not specify whether children trafficked to Togo tend to be boys, girls or
both. However, the fact that a significant number of girls are trafficked into
domestic and market labor from the interior of Togo to Lomé suggests that there
is a substantial demand for female child labor in that city, which may be filled
in part by girls from neighboring countries.

One
girl from Nigeria, trafficked to Lomé when she was fourteen, told Human Rights
Watch she expected to be attending school in Lomé but ended up working as a
housemaid and in the market for five months. "I couldn't even stay with [my
boss]," she said. "I slept outside, and the woman slept at home."[166] Another, trafficked from Accra, Ghana when she was
fifteen, said she was brought to the home of her grandmother's sister and was
told to look after the woman's baby. She said she was beaten whenever the baby
cried and that eventually she escaped and ended up at Terre des Hommes' Oasis
Center.

When
Human Rights Watch met ten-year-old Abena R., she had recently arrived at the
Oasis Center with a badly fractured hand. She said that when she was seven
years old, her sister urged her to accompany a stranger from her home in Accra
to Lomé. "I never knew the woman before," Abena said. "She took me in a car
from Accra to Lomé. I was alone, and it took two to three hours."[167] When Abena arrived in Lomé, her trafficker brought
her to another woman, who made her prepare food, wash her children's clothes
and wash dishes. "She often beat me," Abena said. "She would ask me to do
some work and would say, 'Do it quickly or I'll beat you!'"[168] One day, Abena went to fetch ice water for somebody
instead of bringing her boss a chair as she was asked. "When I came back, my
boss yelled at me and beat me with a stick," she said. "She broke my hand.
She didn't take me to the hospital."[169] According to Terre des Hommes, Abena's hand is
paralyzed and may never heal.

CASE
STUDY: SÉLOM S.,AGE THIRTEEN

Sélom
S.'s mother died in 1988, and his father died in 1994. Three years before his
father died, Sélom stopped going to school. He continued living with his two
younger brothers and his older brother, a mechanic.

One
day, an older man asked Sélom if he wanted to go to Nigeria. The man said if
he went with him, he would teach him a trade and give him a bicycle, a radio
and batteries. He said that if Sélom wanted, he could sell the bicycle and
radio and pay for school. Sélom decided to go, but he didn't say anything to
his older brother. He knew that if he had asked for permission, his brother
would have refused.

The
man told Sélom to meet him at Balanka, a village near the Benin border, at
night. When he got there, Sélom saw that there were many other boys there as
well. The man told all the boys to get into a truck, and they drove to the
border of Togo and Benin. At the border, the man ordered the boys to get out
of the truck and pass through the bushes, one by one, on foot. Once across the
border, the boys got back into the truck and drove for three days. The truck
was packed full, and there was not enough food to go around.

When
he arrived in Nigeria, Sélom was driven to the village of awo, near the city of
ibadan. Two hours later, he was brought to a farm and told to go work in the
fields. The man who brought him said that if he didn't work hard, he would not
be able to eat. He added that he would find sélom work on many different
farms, and that any wages would pay for Sélom's trip to Nigeria.

Sélom
worked in Nigeria for eleven months, clearing fields and planting yam shoots
into small hillocks. He worked from 5:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. every day, and slept
outside in makeshift huts. Sometimes he was forced to use machetes to cut tree
branches. Once he nearly cut his finger off, and his hand was completely
swollen after 2 days. When he showed his boss the injury, his boss said,
"That's nothing-you are too lazy to work."

After eleven months, Sélom's boss gave
him a bicycle and told him to ride it home to Togo. The boss gave him three
bowls of gari and 6,000 CFA (U.S.$9) and told him to share it with five other
boys. On the route from Nigeria to Benin, Sélom and the other boys had to
bribe soldiers with 100-200 CFA (U.S.0.15¢-0.30¢) to let them pass. Sometimes
they were stopped by bandits, who demanded 500 CFA (U.S. 0.75¢) or forced them
to sell their radios for a low price. They slept in fields or bushes, and when
they got hungry they uprooted raw cassava from the fields.

After four days, Sélom made it back to
Togo. Now his brother is looking after him, and sometimes he helps his brother
fix cars. He can't afford to go to school. If he finds work in a field
somewhere, he takes it.

VI. EXTERNAL
TRAFFICKING OF TOGOLESE BOYS

Unlike
girls, boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch were not trafficked into domestic
and market labor, nor were any of them trafficked within Togo. Rather, with
the exception of one child trafficked into factory work in Côte d'Ivoire,[170] boys were trafficked to Benin or Nigeria where they
performed long hours of difficult, unpaid agricultural labor-amounting, as in
the case of girls, to a practice similar to slavery.[171] Boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch typically
said they could not afford to attend school and had few opportunities for
apprenticeships or paid work in Togo. Promised highly coveted goods such as
bicycles, radios and sheet-metal roofing, they readily succumbed to the offers
of child traffickers and in some cases encouraged their friends to accompany
them abroad. Only after months or sometimes years of difficult labor,
characterized by beatings, insufficient food and compulsory use of hazardous
equipment, did these boys realize they had been duped. Human Rights Watch
found scant evidence of the state intervening to protect trafficked boys at any
stage of the trafficking process. On the contrary, interviews revealed that border
patrols sometimes accepted bribes from traffickers taking large numbers of boys
into Benin, and that armed soldiers sometimes stopped boys on their journeys
home from Nigeria and demanded bribes for permission to let them go.

Recruitment

Most
boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch were not recruited through an
arrangement between their parents and an intermediary, but instead were
approached directly by a trafficker and enticed by the prospect of paid work,
vocational training or material rewards. "I thought if I could go to Nigeria
and get rich, I could come back and learn a trade," explained Etse N.,
trafficked to Nigeria in 2001 at age seventeen. "We were poor and had no
money... and I wasn't doing anything."[172] Even more tantalizing to Etse was the thought of
coming home with a radio, a bicycle, or some other luxury he had admired in his
friends. "Some even brought second-hand motorcycles," he said. "They told me
they went to Nigeria, worked in the fields and made a lot of money."[173]

Human
Rights Watch documented numerous strategies used to recruit boys into working
abroad. "[The boys] start hanging around the [bus] stations, and traffickers
look for them there," one local education official said.[174] Tchaa N., trafficked to Nigeria for nine months,
recalled that "[s]omeone from my village approached me in the street and told
me if I went with him, I would be able to buy everything I needed."[175] Tchaa said he brought his cousin along, a boy of
nine who had just started grade four. Almost every trafficked boy interviewed
by Human Rights Watch said something about being offered a bicycle, a radio or
some other commodity by his trafficker. One child, trafficked with his half
brother four years ago, recalled:

A man came around to
both our houses. He was someone our families knew. He talked to us about work
we could get in Nigeria. In the end, suffering is suffering. We had to do
something. I tried hiring myself out with a pousse-pousse[176]
and that didn't work. But this man, Mr. M...-who is now dead-said
we could work and we would get radios and a bike. I needed both.[177]

Of thirty-one
trafficked boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch, sixteen said they left
without their parents' knowledge and, further, that their parents would not
have approved of their leaving. In other cases, the degree to which parents
anticipated personal benefit from their children's work away from home appeared
ambiguous. One parent, furious that her child left for Nigeria without her
permission, reportedly also expressed disappointment that the child did not
return with sheet-metal roofing for the house. Another reportedly forbade his
son from going but said that he could go when he was older.

"A
father who sends his child to Gabon or Côte d'Ivoire with the intention of
having the child work and bring money home does not intend the death of his
child," Justice Emanuel Edorh, chief magistrate of Togo's children's court,
told Human Rights Watch. "He only wants to promote the child's upbringing
because he's in a very difficult situation and thinks he can ameliorate it."[178] Victoire Lawson, project coordinator for the Togo
branch of the Bureau International Catholique de l'Enfance (International
Catholic Children's Bureau, or BICE), speculated that parents were more willing
to send away girls than boys, as parents place a higher value on the education
of the latter. "When a boy is a victim of trafficking, the parents are more
likely to speak up," Lawson said.[179] Some local authorities were more cynical. "Parents
want the sheet metal for their roofs, and they seem to think if their child
continues and succeeds at school, the roofing will be delayed," said Zakar T.
Nambiema,prefect of Bafilo. "I have never had a parent
complain that his/her child has disappeared-never one time. This is the mark
of their complicity."[180]

The
father of Wiyao A., twelve, told Human Rights Watch that a trafficker showed up
at his wife's funeral and offered to take one of his sixteen children to
carpentry school in Côte d'Ivoire. "The man didn't say how much he would make,
or what the work would be like," the father said. "I didn't have any fears,
because I thought the man was an honorable man. I had known him for a long
time and thought he wanted to help me."[181] When Wiyao arrived in Abidjan, the economic capital
of Côte d'Ivoire, he said he was taken to a carpentry workshop where six older
boys were working-three from Abidjan, and three from Togo like him. "We had to
get up at 4:00 a.m., clean the workshop and start working by 6:00," he said. "We
sometimes worked until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m.-they had lights so that we could work
at night."[182]

For
orphans, a lack of parental support renders them vulnerable to being trafficked
multiple times. Atsou S. was first trafficked to Nigeria at age eleven, and
when he got home there was no one to take care of him. "I stayed in Togo for
two weeks and then had to leave again," he told Human Rights Watch. "There was
nothing for me at home, so I thought it would be better to go back and find
work."[183] He said the second boss was nicer than the first,
which emboldened him to go again. "The third time," he said, "I left for
Balanka and met a group. I stayed one year and then bought another bike and
radio and came back. I have now sold both bikes and have one radio left."[184] In all of these cases, Atsou was brought to Nigeria
by an intermediary who profited from his labor. Atsou said he would spend the
money he made from selling his bicycles on his ailing grandmother. "If I leave
again there will be no one to look after her," he said. "Here I can work on
people's farms and make 500 CFA [U.S.75¢] for a day's work. They only need my
help during the rainy season, though, and there hasn't been any rain yet this
year. I am waiting for the rain."[185]

Transport

Once recruited, boys
endured long, sometimes dangerous journeys to their countries of destination.
Boys trafficked from Togo to Nigeria told Human Rights Watch that they were
transported across Benin and into southwest Nigeria. Each journey began with a
trafficker setting a time and a place to meet the child in his
village-sometimes late at night, almost always at some distance from the boy's
house. At the rendezvous point, the child would typically be joined by other
children from his village, all of them destined for work abroad. After
assembling a small group of children, the trafficker would either take the
children directly to Nigeria in a car, or keep them on the Togo side of the
Togo-Benin border and await more children. From these border towns-Pagouda, Tchamba,
Balanka, Kambolé-large groups of boys would cross into Benin and travel
overland for several days into Nigeria.

Human
Rights Watch's interviewees described traveling along diverse routes and in
groups of various sizes. In one case, two boys said they traveled from
Sotouboua, a town not far from Togo's western border, east to Sokodé, and then
to the town of Tchamba where they met forty-three other boys. There all
forty-five boys boarded a fifteen-seat truck and spent three days traveling to
Nigeria. In another case, a boy from Dereboua said he traveled with two others
to Kambolé-itself a circuitous journey-and then to Tchamba where he met eight
others. Another frequently mentioned transit point in Togo was Balanka, a
village just north of Kambolé on the Benin border. Several boys from the
prefecture of Élavagnon reported taking long journeys to Balanka, where they
crossed the border to Benin and met a large contingent-sometimes up to 250
boys-on the other side. One described his journey:

On the other side,
another truck was waiting for us. It had no seats, so we had to stand up in
the truck. We were 250 people in one truck, all standing. It was hot and we
were falling on each other. The truck became so full that some boys had to sit
on the edge. The boys on the edge would sometimes get hit by a tree and fall
down-one boy fell from the truck and broke his leg. There was no hospital
because we were in the bush, so we just picked him up and put him back on the
truck. We drove in that truck for seven days, taking detours to avoid the
soldiers. Sometimes we took the same route used to herd cattle from Nigeria to
Benin. At night we got off the truck and slept in the bush.[186]

At
the Benin-Nigeria border, boys reportedly received various instructions from
their traffickers on how to avoid police and immigration officials. In no case
did a child interviewed by Human Rights Watch remember passing through a proper
checkpoint; rather, children testified to being made to get out of the trucks
at the border, crawling through the bush and taking multiple detours. "There
were soldiers there," said one, "and the person who took us said we could be
returned if we didn't hide. So we got out and walked around the fields, so
they could say we were just peasants in the fields."[187]
In most cases, boys testified to having evaded border patrols by being sent one
by one, across rivers and through the bush, sometimes with the help of a paid
accomplice.

Some
testimony revealed collusion between traffickers and the border patrol. "We
were told to bribe the guards if we got caught," said one boy, who was
traveling without about fifty other children. "The trafficker gave us some
money and told us to bribe them."[188]
One of the boys being transported in the group of forty-five in a fifteen-seat
truck (see above) said his trafficker was told by an official to pay a
"surcharge."[189]
Human Rights Watch interviewed only one child who was stopped at the border en
route to Benin. After bringing the boy home, the police arrested both the
trafficker and the boy's father, who had allegedly consented to the
trafficking.[190]
The boy's father told Human Rights Watch he was imprisoned for twenty-five
days; according to the boy, the trafficker was still in prison at the time of
Human Rights Watch's visit.

Truck
journeys like the one described above lasted up to eight days, depending on how
direct the route was and how often the truck broke down. Atsou S., fourteen,
told Human Rights Watch that the first time he was trafficked, the back of the
truck physically broke apart from the front:

My friend and I walked
to Balanka and got on a truck to Nigeria. When the truck was passing through
the bush, the back split in half and we all fell off. We had to wait a day for
a second truck. There were nearly 200 children on that truck. When we got to
the border, we got off and someone helped us across, where another truck was
waiting. It took us eight days to get to Nigeria.[191]

Road
travel in the region is notoriously dangerous, most roads being narrow,
pot-holed and composed of hard-packed sand.[192] Crossing Benin from west to east requires traversing
up to three rivers-the Couffo in the south, the Zou and the Ouémé in the east.
Children interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported swimming across rivers,
pushing vehicles through shallow water and crossing in small boats or canoes.
One described the river crossing as "wild." Another described having to cross
the border at night and keep the truck from tipping into the river:

It was night when I
got to Balanka. We left at 6:00 pm and got to the Benin border by 10:00. When
we got to the border there were many routes to take-we got off the truck and
passed on foot through the bush to avoid the police. We went one by one and
had a meeting point on the other side. When we got to the river there was no
bridge, so we crossed in the truck, trying to keep it balanced so it wouldn't
tip. There was no food, and the truck was packed full. When we passed under
the trees, some boys hit their heads on tree branches. I nearly fell off. We
spent three more days on the road, sometimes stopping in a little village to
eat some gari.[193]

A
small number of children recounted having been trafficked singly rather than in
a group. Twelve-year-old Wiyao A., who worked in a furniture factory in
Abidjan, said his trafficker first brought him to Atitogon, a small town in the
far south of Togo. He slept at the man's house, and the two of them departed
for Lomé the next morning. From Lomé, Wiyao said he and his trafficker took a
bus to Ghana and then drove all night to the border of Côte d'Ivoire. The next
day, they crossed without speaking to anyone and took a public bus to Abidjan.

Receipt and
Exploitation

Most
of the boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported working on farms in the
towns and villages of Nigeria's southwest plateau. The use of child labor in
this region is not limited to boys trafficked from Togo, but is part of a
larger phenomenon involving boys trafficked from Nigeria's Akwa Ibom, Cross
River and Imo states. A recent article in Nigeria's Insider Weekly
magazine identified a Nigerian "slave triangle" between Ore in Ondo State,
Shagamu in Ogun State and Lagos, Nigeria's largest city. According to the
former chairman of the Yakurr Local Government, an area of Cross River State
reported to be hard-hit by child trafficking recruitment, the trade is largely
driven by local organized crime networks who profit from selling children to
local subsistence farmers.

Togolese
boys trafficked to Nigeria reported working on various farms in villages near
Ibadan and Ogbomosho, both cities in Oyo State. Their testimony to Human
Rights Watch revealed several trafficking routes within Nigeria: from Lagos
north to Oyo city; from Ibadan to Awe; and from Ogbomosho to farms in the
surrounding area. All of the areas in which they remembered working were
either in Oyo state or in neighboring Oshun state.

Boys
reported that from the beginning of the dry season in January until the end of
the second rainy season in October, they cultivated yams, cassava, rice, beans,
peanuts, sorghum, maize, sesame, and millet. Boys trafficked to Benin said
they worked on cash crops such as cotton and cashews.

For
the boys interviewed, work began almost immediately upon arrival and continued
without respite. "We arrived in Nigeria and went straight to work," said one
fifteen-year-old, trafficked in 2001. "We weeded the
fields.... We planted cassava, yam, rice, and sorghum."[194]
The tasks performed by the children, sometimes at ages as young as seven,
varied. Many said they were told to shape the flat land into rows of small
hillocks into which they planted yam shoots or other seedlings. "Dealing with
the mounds was the hardest for us," one said, "because we didn't know how to do
it."[195]
Another child, trafficked at age eleven, said the mounds were prepared row by
row and, as a small boy, he had trouble keeping up with the others around him.
Other tasks included weeding, clearing the brush, sowing seeds, and plowing.

According
to these boys, most traffickers found short-term work for their recruits on
local farms and then collected their wages. In this way, traffickers maximized
their profits by assigning multiple jobs over a short period. "When we were
finished with one job, they would find us another one," said Etse N., who
started in Ogbomosho with a group of nine others.[196]
He described this routine:

If a job wasn't big
enough for nine boys, the trafficker would divide us into small groups. I
worked on many different farms, and my trafficker kept looking for more jobs.
I worked on maybe thirty farms a month. My trafficker wanted to make a lot of
money, so he would find me jobs that were too big to handle-I'd be told to
start something at 5:00 pm and not come home until I finished.[197]

Another child described going
from one town to the next, often traveling distances of up to fifty miles, to
earn money for his trafficker:

There were about
twenty-five of us. We worked from 7:00 in the morning until 2:00 in the
afternoon. Then we went to Isseyin, and we started the work. We worked from
5:00 in the morning until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. They gave us gari at
noon. We did weeding, preparing the hillocks, everything, for cassava, beans,
peanuts and millet. More boys would come during the harvest.[198]

This assigning-out system
apparently provided traffickers with an incentive to maximize profits by
overworking children. "It was like slavery," said seventeen-year-old Sélom S.,
reportedly trafficked from Fasao after his parents died in 1994. "We worked
from 5:00 a.m. to 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. without much of a break."[199]
The hours children said they spent working in the fields were excessive by any
standard, all the more so given their age. Children recalled working
fifteen-hour days, starting at 5:00 a.m. and finishing as late as 8:00 p.m.
They took few if any breaks, on average an hour at lunchtime to nap or eat some
gari. They said they worked seven days a week and took no holidays.
One child, trafficked at the age of twelve, described having to work longer
hours in order to keep up with the older boys:

I had to do the same
work as the older boys. The smaller kids would cry because the work was too
hard. We told our boss the work was too hard, but he said we had to continue.
If we didn't finish our day's work, he would make us get up at 3:00 a.m. the
next day instead of 5:00 a.m. We had one rest at lunchtime and worked until
8:00 p.m.[200]

Many
boys described conditions of bonded labor, or working in conditions of
servitude in order to pay off a debt. "[My boss] said he would pay for the
trip and I could work off the money," said Mawuena W., trafficked when he was
eleven. "We worked from 6:00 in the morning until 6:30 at night, and at
mid-day they gave us gari and pigeonpea."[201]
Others described having to pay for directions home once the rainy season was
over. "The boss hired someone to show us the road home, and we had to pay him,
too," he said. "He left us in Benin." Asked why they did not flee sooner,
children spoke of the fear of being in a foreign country, the fact that they
had no money with which to get home, and the hope that the next job would be
easier than the last. "I didn't know where to go," said Mawuena W. "I didn't
know the place where we were, and the man kept saying if I wanted a bike, I
would have to work."[202]

Exposure to Hazards
and Abuse

Most
boys interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported suffering physical injuries on
the job. Some of these were from corporal punishment by their employers. "If
you didn't work well or fast enough, they punished you," said one child. "You
had to go draw and transport water all day or you were beaten with a stick. I
was beaten ten times."[203] Another child said younger children bore the brunt
of the beatings. "Our boss would attack us if we complained, or beat the
younger kids with a stick if they didn't work hard enough," he said. Having
kept in contact with some of the younger children with whom he worked, this
child said they were still scarred from their beatings.[204]

Other
injuries resulted from the compulsory use of dangerous equipment. A few boys
said they used machetes to cut the branches off trees, sometimes leading to
physical injury. "It was only when someone had a cut on the leg from a machete
or something else that they could see bleeding that they would let you stop
working," one child told Human Rights Watch.[205] Others were not permitted to stop working if they
sustained an injury. "I nearly cut my finger off with the machete. My hand
was completely swollen after two days," said one boy. "I showed the boss, and
he said, 'That's nothing-you are too lazy to work.'"[206] Wiyao A., whose job was to saw and sand wood for
furniture, cut himself twice with a saw, once on each hand.[207] "Our boss never took us to the hospital," Wiyao said
when asked about his injuries. "When we said we were sick, he would accuse us
of lying."[208]

The
fear of being sick or injured and thereby having to make up time or endure
punishment was a recurring theme in Human Rights Watch's interviews with trafficked
boys. "Because I got sick and couldn't work more, I didn't get a radio," said
one child, who reportedly worked on a farm for eight months.[209] Mawuena W., trafficked when he was eleven, told a
similar story. "One time I got sick with malaria and had to go to the
hospital," he said. "At the end I got a bike, but they didn't give me a radio
because I had been sick and missed time."[210] Others said they kept their sickness to themselves,
fearing they might even be deprived of food. "If you are ill and can't work,"
one said, "you are forced or you won't be able to eat."[211]

Return

Boys
who worked in agriculture in Nigeria recounted spending anywhere from eight
months to two years abroad, after which they were released by their
traffickers.[212] Typically around October or November, they said,
they were given a bicycle and some other compensation such as a radio or
sheet-metal roofing and instructed to find their way home. Some boys recalled
being given cash for food or transportation, while others said they were
referred to accomplices who charged them for indicating the path home. In one
case, three boys said they found temporary paid work in Nigeria after being
released from their traffickers. Many boys said they sold everything but their
bicycles in order to pay for food, directions or bribes. The bicycles were
often sold on arrival.

As
detailed below (see Section VII: State Response), the Togolese government has a
policy of assisting trafficked children with safe return home and prosecuting
the perpetrators. In interviews with Human Rights Watch, however, boys did not
recall receiving any state assistance on their journeys home, either from
Togolese or foreign authorities. Those trafficked to Nigeria described
unassisted journeys by bicycle from Nigeria back to their villages, lasting up
to nine days. They told of being robbed, forced to bribe soldiers, and going
days on end without food. "We were sent home with three bowls of gari
and 6,000 CFA [U.S.$9]," said one boy, who left with two friends. "On the way
from Nigeria to Benin, we had to bribe soldiers with 100-200 CFA [U.S.15-30¢]
to let us pass."[213] His friend continued the story. "After we ran out
of food, we would steal cassava from a farm and eat it raw, like pigs. We did
this for three days."[214] Some boys told Human Rights Watch their money was
stolen by bandits on the road. "Sometimes we were stopped by people who
threatened to take our bicycles," said one boy. "They would intercept us and
demand 500 CFA [U.S.75¢] or force us to sell our radios for a low price."[215]

Asked
about the situation of boys traveling from Nigeria back to Togo, Suzanne Aho
told Human Rights Watch that some have not made it home. "There are cases of
boys who have died on the road on the way back," she said. "If someone sees
the cadaver, all they can do is bury it. These boys pay with their lives."[216]

Wiyao
A., in factory work in Abidjan, told Human Rights Watch that he fled with a
friend two years after being trafficked, after receiving news that his mother
had died in a lorry accident. Like the boys trafficked to Nigeria, Wiyao and
his friend did not receive any state assistance from Ivorian authorities;
rather, a stranger led them to the Abidjan office of the Bureau International
Catholique de l'Enfance (BICE), which housed them temporarily, arranged for a
government bus to Lomé and reunited them with their families. Once they
arrived home, things apparently worsened for Wiyao's friend. "When we were in
Abidjan, he was coughing a lot," Wiyao recalled, "but our master ignored him.
Whenever we complained about being sick, he told us we were lazy and just
didn't want to work."[217] Shortly after he returned home, Wiyao's friend died
reportedly of tuberculosis. "They didn't detect it early enough," Wiyao said.
"He went to the hospital, and he died almost a year ago."[218]

While
many trafficked boys said they were urged to return the following season for
more work, most said the experience was not worth it. "The bicycle was too
little for the work I did," said one. "If I could find a job here, I could buy
three bicycles for the amount of work I did."[219] At the same time, boys spoke of their limited
opportunities at home. "When I got home I had nothing to eat, so I looked for
odd jobs," said one boy, reportedly trafficked when he was twelve. "I would go
to the bicycle repairman and help him out in exchange for food. Before I left
for Nigeria I was in grade four, but now I don't go to school."[220] Others testified to a similar lack of prospects.
"My parents are careful and they won't let me go," said one. "But I'm back in
the same situation. I don't have money to buy fertilizer, and I can't get a
government job."[221] Those who tried to persuade their friends not to go
to Nigeria reported dubious success. "Once we knew of five people who were
going," one said, "and we managed to stop them. But then they told everyone
that we had bikes and didn't want other boys to have bikes like us."[222]

VII. FAILURES IN
STATE RESPONSE

Ensuring
a safe return home is one of the principal obligations states owe to trafficked
children. West African countries are in various respects failing in this
obligation.[223]

"Rescue" of
Trafficked Children

In
no case did Human Rights Watch document a "rescue" of a trafficked child
initiated by Togolese or other authorities; rather, judging from the interviews
by Human Rights Watch, girls' first encounter with authorities typically
occurred after they found their way to a police station, usually with the help
of civilians, while boys did not recall receiving any state assistance on their
journeys home.

It
has been reported, however, that police in Gabon conduct periodic roundups of
trafficked children and arrange for their repatriation by the embassy of their
country of origin; this action has been described as "the only regulation in
existence [in Gabon] to resolve the problem of child victims of trafficking."[224]

Togo's Official
Repatriation and Reintegration Initiatives

Togolese
children who are found to have been trafficked abroad are supposed to be
brought to the local Togolese embassy and repatriated according to an agreement
between Togo and the country of destination.[225]

Once
in the hands of Togolese authorities, trafficked children are meant to be
reunited with their families according to a protocol set by Togo's Ministry of
Social Affairs. According to Judge Emanuel Edorh, chief magistrate of Togo's
children's court, Social Affairs helps children locate their families and,
where necessary, obtains judicial authorization to place a trafficked child in
an NGO-operated shelter.[226] Government-operated shelters for trafficked children
do not exist in Togo, nor does a formal mechanism for housing abused, neglected
or abandoned children. The main facility used for these purposes, based in
Lomé, is run by the NGO Terre des Hommes and is known as the Oasis Center.
Before the government began cooperating with NGOs such as Terre des Hommes,
authorities used to place trafficked children in detention along with children
in conflict with the law; this practice was officially discontinued in Togo in
1998, however.[227] As discussed below, Togo does not have enough
facilities to accommodate all returned children who require institutional care.

The
individual responsible for trafficked children at Social Affairs is the director
of the Department for the Protection and Promotion of the Family and Children.
Suzanne Aho, who held this position during the time Human Rights Watch
conducted this research, told Human Rights Watch she took care of particular
tasks like identifying children's families, delegating temporary custody of
repatriated children to local NGOs, and opening bank accounts for children who
come back with money.[228] She also kept detailed records of trafficked
children and supervised a staff of agents at the prefectoral and village
level. Witha U.S.$302,000 grant from the World Bank, shared with the
NGO CARE-Togo, Aho developed a system for training local "vigilance committees"
to monitor trafficked children once they return home and help them with
education and job training. The vigilance committees are also intended to
prevent future cases of trafficking by, among other things, educating parents
about the dangers of child labor, and reporting suspicious activity to the
police.

Journalist
Birgit Schwarz, who accompanied nine trafficked girls on their return home to
Togo from Gabon with the help of a Gabonese NGO, described her encounter with
Togo's reintegration process as "a web of petty jealousies and people fighting
with one another."[229] Schwarz told Human Rights Watch that after the girls
were received at Terre des Hommes' Oasis Center, the Department of Social
Affairs transferred four of the nine children to the police station. "These
children were already wary of being locked up by strangers after their experience
in the Niger Delta," Schwarz said.[230] But when she and an NGO worker went to the police
station to check on the children, they were reportedly interrogated without
being formally arrested, and harassed. "We were told we would see the
children," Schwarz recalled, "but then the police officers accompanied us back
to our hotel, searched everything, and interrogated us for several hours. We
only got our film back because the [German] ambassador went straight to the
president to get it returned."[231] Several officials from Togolese NGOs complained of a
lack of coordination between government and NGO actors in the reintegration
process, leading in some cases to the interruption of services being provided
to trafficked children.[232]

Togo's
children's court, which has jurisdiction over children who have been abused,
neglected or orphaned, faces numerous challenges when it comes to protecting
trafficked children. Judge Emanuel Edorh, chief magistrate of the children's
court, told Human Rights Watch that two major obstacles faced by the court at
the moment are the unauthorized placement of children in institutions and a
lack of resources to investigate children's family situations. "You can't just
place a child in an institution without the authorization of a judge," Edorh
said. "This rule is meant to protect children."[233] Edorh went on to explain that the Ministry of Social
Affairs is supposed to bring repatriated children to the court so that an
investigation can be judicially ordered, but this is "not always how it works
in practice."[234] In some cases, for example, government officials
invite children to their homes or take them to NGOs without judicial
authorization. Though he made no suggestion of bad faith on the part of these
officials, Edorh insisted it was in the child's best interests to be placed in
a court-appointed institution pending an investigation of their family
situation.

As
already noted, to its credit Togo has prohibited the detention of trafficked
children as a matter of policy. However, this prohibition was violated in the
case of the Togolese girl detailed in a police cell on her return to Togo,
described above, which constitutes a breach of the child's right to be free
from arbitrary detention under article 37(b) of the U.N. Convention on the Rights
of the Child. This states that the detention of a child "shall be in
conformity with the law and shall only be used as a measure of last resort and
for the shortest appropriate period of time."[235]

The
reintegration efforts described here constitute positive government
interventions which, if implemented properly, can protect the human rights of
trafficked children and ensure their humane return to their families. Such
efforts may also prevent children from falling into other forms of hazardous
work or, worse, being trafficked a second time. The system in place in Togo,
however, relies exclusively on the cooperation of local NGOs and falls short of
international standards regarding the return and reintegration of trafficked
children. These standards, articulated in both international conventions and
expert reports,[236] emphasize the humane reintegration of all
trafficked children, including social, medical and psychological counseling;
action to remove stigmatization of trafficked children; and promotion of
schooling and vocational training. The testimony of trafficked children
interviewed by Human Rights Watch, in particular their vulnerability to sexual
exploitation if left without care, underscores the importance of establishing a
consistent protocol for the safe return of trafficked children in Togo and
applying such a protocol universally.

Recipient Countries'
Shelter and Repatriation Services

In Gabon,
the government only recently initiated a program to protect trafficked
children, establishing in March 2002 a shelter to provide them with legal,
medical and psychological assistance. The Gabonese government also provides
protective services in cooperation with local NGOs, including one operated by a
former high school teacher from Togo.

Although
Nigeria has drafted anti-trafficking legislation and demonstrated a
commitment to prosecuting traffickers (see below), its protection of trafficked
children is modest at best. A police unit in Lagos assists in the repatriation
of trafficked children and provides short-term shelter; however, many
trafficked children never make it to Lagos, and services have not been
established in rural areas where children are known to be trafficked.

In Benin and Côte
d'Ivoire, both countries of destination of Togolese children, the
government relies on NGOs and international organizations to repatriate
trafficked children and provide them with much-needed assistance. Côte
d'Ivoire is also known for its successful bilateral accord with Mali, under
which thousands of foreign trafficked children have been repatriated since
2000.

Prosecution of
Traffickers

There
is an almost total lack of prosecution of child traffickers in Togo.
Ten traffickers were arrested or detained in 2001, only to be released in most
cases for lack of evidence.[237]
Prosecution is especially difficult in countries such as Togo, where the
judiciary is not fully independent; in January 2002, an Interpol Crime
Intelligence Officer told a U.N. news service that corruption often prevents
prosecutors from moving forward on child trafficking cases identified by police
officers.[238]
A lack of prosecution is also the case for Gabon, despite the drafting
of an anti-trafficking law in August 2001.[239]
In Benin, also a significant destination country for Togolese children,
the government has had some success in intercepting and arresting traffickers
but as of this writing, had not prosecuted any cases to conclusion.[240]
Though some prosecutions are currently underway in Benin, a Beninese police
chief recently reported to a journalist that of forty-five people he had
arrested and sentenced for trafficking from 1997 to 2001, none ever went to
prison.[241]
In Côte d'Ivoire, as in Benin, an absence of targeted legislation
combined with an apparent lack of political will makes prosecution of
traffickers difficult if not impossible.

In
addition to being a recipient country of trafficked boys, Nigeria is a
significant country of origin for women trafficked to Europe and the Middle
East, and has begun several high-profile prosecutions of persons organizing
this trade.[242]

VIII. LEGAL PROTECTION AGAINST CHILD TRAFFICKING

National Law

Togo

Child
trafficking is not specifically mentioned in Togolese law; however, as of this
writing a draft anti‑trafficking law was before the Togolese legislative
assembly as part of a draft Children's Code. The draft Children's Code
consolidates relevant provisions of the Family Code along with some provisions
of international conventions ratified by Togo (for example, the Convention on
the Rights of the Child and the Hague Convention against International Child
Abduction) and other pieces of domestic legislation. Most of the provisions
incorporating articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child are found
in Title II of the draft Children's Code (Child's Right to Special Protection)
and Title III (Penal Protection of Children). Title III, which contains the
proposed anti‑trafficking provisions, includes protections for both
children in conflict with the law (Chapter I) and child victims of violence
(Chapter II).

The
proposed anti‑trafficking provisions are contained in articles 459 to 466
of Title III, Chapter II of the draft code. Article 460 incorporates the
definition of child trafficking found in the U.N. Trafficking Protocol, which
is the "recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt" of a
child for the purposes of sexual or labor exploitation, forced labor, or
slavery.[243] Trafficking of children is punishable by a five‑to‑ten‑year
prison term and a fine of between 1 and 10 million CFA (U.S.$1,500‑$15,000).[244] Participants in organized trafficking rings may be
punished more severely, with a prison term of ten to twenty years and a fine of
between 10 and 100 million CFA (U.S.$15,000‑ $150,000).[245] Article 462 governs "attempted trafficking," an
offense punishable with five to ten years of imprisonment and a 1 to 10 million
CFA fine.[246]

Articles
463 and 464 impose penalties on those who aid and abet child trafficking,
including parents. This includes anyone who would "intentionally help in the
commission of child trafficking" (Article 463), as well as parents or relatives
who "give up a child for sale" (Article 464). No further definition of these
practices is provided. Article 463 also imposes a one‑ to five‑year
prison term on any relative or other person who, knowing that a trafficking
infraction is about to be committed, fails to report it to a relevant
authority.[247] It reads:

ART. 463 – That
relatives, intermediaries, receivers and any other person who would
intentionally help in the commission of child trafficking incur the same
penalties. To be sentenced to one to five years of imprisonment are the
relatives to the fourth degree,[248]
neighbors and any other persons who will have knowledge of the situation of a
child who is victim of an attempted trafficking or sale in the case in which it
can be supposed that a denunciation of the attempt would impede the realization
of the infraction or a subsequent commission of the infraction but who would
not have denounced [the crime] to competent authorities.[249]

It
is noteworthy that, at the same time it imposes a one‑to‑five‑year
prison term on parents and relatives who assist child traffickers, the draft
legislation contains no explicit provisions on the protection and reintegration
of trafficked children, and only one provision calling for "appropriate" state
measures to prevent child trafficking (Article 465).

The
foregoing provisions on parental complicity were included in the draft
legislation over the objections of the president of the Children's Code
drafting committee, Judge Emanuel Edorh. Edorh told Human Rights Watch that
"everyone [on the committee] wanted to criminalize parental involvement,"
including "representatives from international NGOs."[250] But in his view, "it does not further the rights of
the child to violate human rights [of parents] in this way…. If a father takes
a risk with his child, we know he's committed an infraction and has to be
punished. But where I part with my fellow committee members is whether such a
parent should be imprisoned for six years. The punishment should be six months
to a year, not six years."[251] Suzanne Aho agreed. "We need to soften what's
written [in the draft Children's Code] on punishment of parents because of how
that might affect children," she told Human Rights Watch. "Children are also
stigmatized when they have a parent in prison."[252]

Edorh's
and Aho's views contrast with many that prevail in Togo's interior. In Bafilo,
a village elder asserted that for "some parents, children are just a way to
make money"; another added that "parents think their children can bring back
something valuable. A lot don't think [trafficking] is so bad."[253] Waka Cne Arregba, the prefect of Bassar, said he
sometimes threatens parents with punishment to deter them from cooperating with
traffickers. "In this job, I am both prefect and policeman at the same time,"
he told Human Rights Watch. "People are afraid of me. We have to show force
and tell the parents that if they are complicit we will put them in jail."[254]

Human
Rights Watch opposes the imprisonment of parents who cooperate with child
traffickers, in particular those who cooperate merely by failing to report
known traffickers to the police. Where parents are guilty of child abuse,
criminal negligence or any similar offense, they should be prosecuted to the
full extent of the law. However, interviews with trafficked children
consistently showed that parents did not intentionally abuse or neglect their
children in the course of negotiating with child traffickers, but rather became
resigned to the idea of sending their children away based upon false depictions
of education, professional training or paid work abroad. Under these
circumstances, Human Rights Watch recommends that parental involvement in child
trafficking be addressed through a system of public education and special
protection for children, rather than through criminal sanctions.

In
terms of special protection for trafficked children, Togo's draft Children's
Code contains a general section on the protection of children from violence,
abuse and neglect perpetrated by parents and third parties. The key provision
is article 401, which provides that if a child's health, morals, education or
security are threatened, a judge of the children's court may order the child
removed from his or her family environment and placed in an institution or with
a specified guardian for a period of up to twenty‑four months.[255]

Other Countries

Children
interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported being trafficked to six different
countries in West Africa, namely, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Niger, Nigeria,
as well as Togo. As noted above, these countries possess different levels of
legal protection against child trafficking, both in terms of the prosecution of
traffickers and of the protection and reintegration of trafficked children.
Some, like Gabon, Nigeria and Togo, have drafted specific legislation against
child trafficking and, at this writing, were in the process of enacting it.
Others rely on related offenses such as unauthorized migration of children,
forced labor, fraudulent entry into national territory, and kidnapping.[256] In either case, however, prosecution of child
traffickers has been sporadic. While Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Togo
systematically arrest and detain traffickers, they have failed to prosecute
most cases to conclusion.[257] Gabon and Niger report few arrests of child
traffickers, let alone successful prosecutions.[258]

In
its 2001 synthesis report on child trafficking in West Africa, ILO‑IPEC
reviewed the various legal and policy protections available to trafficked
children in West Africa and concluded that "there is an absence of legislation
in almost all the countries on this theme."[259] While recognizing that some prosecutions of child
traffickers have taken place, ILO‑IPEC noted that criminal proceedings
are "complicated and out of reach of the victims" and inaccessible to parents
and child welfare professionals who are "ignorant or mistrustful of the
judicial system."[260] In addition, the report noted that despite the
minimum age for employment being laid down by law, a lack of inspection
capacity on the part of the ministries of labor contributes to the enduring
prevalence of child work. Finally, despite the fact that some countries, including
Togo, require special authorization for minors to cross borders, the ILO‑IPEC
report noted that lax enforcement of immigration laws allows traffickers to
evade checkpoints and transport children across borders in large numbers.

Regional Anti‑trafficking
Efforts

Among
West African countries, combined efforts against child trafficking have taken
the form of bilateral agreements on the repatriation of trafficked children,
negotiations for a regional anti‑trafficking convention, and efforts to
harmonize domestic legislation. One bilateral agreement is that between Mali
and Côte d'Ivoire, established in 2000 to prohibit the trafficking of children
between the two countries for labor.[261] Togo has had a quadripartite repatriation agreement
with Ghana, Benin and Nigeria since 1996. The trafficking documented in this
report suggests a need for similar cooperation with Gabon and Côte d'Ivoire.

In
February 2000, officials from twenty‑one countries met in Libreville,
Gabon and agreed to a "common platform for action" against child trafficking.[262] A follow‑up consultation in March 2002
produced a strong consensus for a subregional convention against the
trafficking of children and established a plan for the adoption of such a
convention by December 2004.[263] As of this writing, this convention had not been
drafted.

The
Libreville process has benefited from a number of regional meetings and
declarations designed to increase the knowledge base around child trafficking,
mobilize national governments and harmonize national legislation.[264] Significant among these is an "Initial Plan of
Action" developed by the fifteen member states of the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS) in Dakar in December 2001.[265] Child trafficking also reached the agenda of the Organization
of African Unity (OAU) Council of Ministers just before that organization
became the African Union (A.U.) in July 2002. Following the recommendation of
the OAU Commission on Labour and Social
Affairs,[266] the OAU
Council of Ministers resolved in July 2002 to call on member states to include
"compulsory education, the elimination of child labour as well as children in
conflict situations and child trafficking" in their priority programs on
children.[267]

International Law

Overview

Child
trafficking is prohibited under international law as both a "practice similar
to slavery" and one of the "worst forms of child labor."[268] The Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most
far‑ranging treaty on the civil, political, economic, social, and
cultural rights of children, obliges states parties to "take all appropriate
national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the abduction, the
sale of or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form."[269] The Convention on the Rights of the Child further obliges
states to ensure that children are not separated from their parents against
their will; to take measures to combat the illicit transfer and nonreturn of
children abroad; and to protect children from economic exploitation, hazardous
labor, involvement in drug trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse and any
other form of exploitation.[270]

Of
additional relevance to child trafficking is the Convention on the Rights of
the Child's guarantee of protection against abuse and neglect within the
family. Article 20(1) provides that "a child temporarily or permanently
deprived of his or her family environment, or in whose own best interests
cannot be allowed to remain in that environment, shall be entitled to special
protection and assistance provided by the State."[271] This provision is especially relevant to children
who have already been trafficked, particularly where parents have been
complicit in the trafficking. The guiding principle in interpreting article 20
is the best interests of the child,[272] a principle that may in certain cases militate
against the incarceration of parents who collude with child traffickers. For
example, article 5 of the U.N. General Assembly's 1986 Declaration on Social
and Legal Principles relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children
recognizes the child's need for continued contact with his or her parents; it
states that "in all matters relating to the placement of a child outside the
care of the child's own parents, the best interests of the child, particularly
his or her need for affection and right to security and continuing care, should
be the paramount consideration."[273]

Togo
ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990. In 1997, the
Committee on the Rights of the Child, the treaty body responsible for monitoring
implementation of the convention, stated in its concluding observations on Togo
that it was "seriously worried by the widespread sale and trafficking of
children which result in their economic and sexual exploitation."[274] Commenting on Togo's implementation of the child
protection provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the
Committee expressed concern about "the persistence of child abuse, including
ill‑treatment in the family, and the absence at the administration level
of an appropriate mechanism to prevent and combat this phenomenon."[275]

Since
1999, three specialized treaties related to child trafficking have been
negotiated. The U.N. Protocol to the U.N. Convention Against Transnational
Organized Crime to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Especially Women and Children (2000; known as the Trafficking Protocol)
provides a model definition of child trafficking which has been incorporated
into Togo's draft Children's Code.[276] Though not yet ratified by Togo or entered into
force worldwide, the Trafficking Protocol has been signed by Togo and reflects
a comprehensive international effort to codify a definition of child
trafficking. The Trafficking Protocol isolates the three elements of child
trafficking as: (1) the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or
receipt;[277] (2) of any person under eighteen years of age; [278] (3) for the purposes of sexual or labor exploitation,
forced labor, or slavery.[279] Because the countries that negotiated the
Trafficking Protocol were unable to agree upon a definition of the term
"exploitation," the protocol defines the term as including, at a minimum, "the
exploitation or the prostitution of others or other forms of exploitation,
forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude
or the removal of organs."[280]

Article
3(c) of the Trafficking Protocol states that where children, as opposed to
adults, are concerned, trafficking can exist in the absence of any coercion,
abduction, fraud or deception. The provision has led to the observation that
"[the] concept of 'willingness' is no longer accepted in international law
since the adoption of the [Trafficking Protocol]....
The Protocol specifically excludes the possibility of 'consent' to trafficking
by any person under the age of 18."[281] The Trafficking Protocol calls on states to take
measures to prevent and punish child trafficking, including the enactment of
criminal laws; to provide assistance and protection to trafficked persons; and
to cooperate at the ministerial and governmental level in the achievement of
these objectives.

ILO
Convention No. 182 concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the
Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (1999) situates child
trafficking within the broader issue of child labor.[282] Convention 182 obliges states to take urgent and
immediate action to eradicate child trafficking; it characterizes trafficking
as a "practice similar to slavery," one that belongs in the same category as
forced labor.[283] Convention 182 underlies the work of the
International Programme to Eliminate Child Labor (IPEC), an ILO program
designed to mobilize knowledge, advocacy and service around child labor.
Having ratified Convention 182 in 2000, Togo is mandated to work with IPEC to
create and implement a national plan of action against the worst forms of child
labor, including child trafficking. The Convention is buttressed by a range of
international conventions on forced labor, discrimination in employment and
child labor, all of them ratified by Togo.[284]

A
third recent anti‑trafficking treaty is the Optional Protocol to the
Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child
Prostitution and Child Pornography (2000). Togo signed the Optional Protocol
in November 2001 but has not ratified it; it entered into force worldwide in
January 2002. Parties to the protocol are required to enact penal laws against
the "offering, delivering or accepting" of a child for the purpose of sexual
exploitation or forced labor.[285] They are further required to establish jurisdiction
over these offenses, extradite offenders where necessary, provide each other
with legal assistance, and provide for the confiscation of prohibited goods or
proceeds of crime. Beyond prosecution, states are required to provide support
services and witness protection for trafficked children, to take measures to
prevent the offenses listed in the protocol, and to strengthen international
cooperation in the fight against trafficking.

In
addition to mandating the progressive eradication of child trafficking, all
four of the abovementioned treaties guarantee trafficked children rights with
respect to their social recovery and reintegration. Article 39 of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges states parties to "take all
appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social
reintegration of a child victim of … any form of neglect, exploitation or
abuse."[286] This guarantee is given additional content in
article 6 of the Trafficking Protocol, article 7 of Convention No.182 and
article 8 of the Optional Protocol.[287] Guidance in protecting trafficked children may also
be found in the Agenda for Action of the First World Congress against
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (1996), the so‑called
Stockholm Agenda, which has been accorded some weight by the Committee on the
Rights of the Child.[288] Among the recommendations in the Stockholm Agenda
applicable to child labor trafficking are the provision of social, medical and
psychological counseling to trafficked children; gender‑sensitive
training of medical personnel, teachers, social workers, and NGOs; action to
prevent and remove social stigmatization of trafficked children; promotion of
alternative means of livelihood to trafficked children and their families; and
measures to create behavioral changes on the part of perpetrators.[289]

Relevant Law on Child
Slavery

The
abuses described by Human Rights Watch's interviewees constitute practices
similar to slavery as defined by both the the U.N. Supplementary Convention on
the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices
Similar to Slavery (1956) and ILO No. Convention 182. Ratified by Togo in
1980,the Slavery Convention defines as a practice similar to slavery "any institution
or practice whereby a child or young person under the age of eighteen years, is
delivered by either or both of his natural parents or by his guardian to
another person, whether for reward or not, with a view to the exploitation of
the child or young person or of his labour."[290] This definition captures many of the situations
described by Human Rights Watch's interviewees and overlaps considerably with
the definition of child trafficking found in the U.N. Trafficking Protocol.
ILO Convention No. 182 goes a step further, explicitly classifying child
trafficking as one of many "practices similar to slavery."[291] While Convention No. 182 does not define either
child trafficking or slavery, it is clear from the Slavery Convention and the
Trafficking Protocol that the combination of movement and exploitation of a
child is what the two have in common.

Even
outside the context of trafficking, child domestic labor has been deemed to
constitute a practice similar to slavery when performed under certain circumstances.
In interviews with girls trafficked into domestic labor as well as local
experts, Human Rights Watch documented long hours of unpaid work, physical
abuse, sexual abuse, denial of education for the period of domestic labor, and
responsibilities exceeding girls' age and capacity. Many girls recalled
negotiations between their parents and intermediaries involving fraud,
deception or an exchange of money.[292] Noting many of these hazards, UNICEF stated in 1999
that "the exploitation, abuse and discrimination suffered by child domestic
workers . . . are to be deplored and . . . are in violation of the 1956
[Slavery Convention]."[293]

IX. DETAILED
RECOMMENDATIONS

To all West African
governments implicated in the trafficking of children, including Togo, Benin,
Nigeria, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Gabon[294]

Concerning the
prosecution of child trafficking and related offenses

·Ratify the United Nations (U.N.)
Protocol to the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish the Trafficking of Persons especially Women and Children
(2000-the Trafficking Protocol) and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on
the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child
Pornography (2000). Promptly enact legislation creating the offense of child
trafficking, consistent with the above protocols as well as with the U.N.
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and International Labour
Organization (ILO) Convention No. 182 and Recommendation No. 190 concerning the
Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of
Child Labour (1999).

·Consistent with the consensus
decision of the 2002 consultation meeting in Libreville, Gabon, of twenty‑one
African states, establish a regional anti‑trafficking convention,
ensuring that any convention incorporates full protection of the human rights
of trafficked children. Include qualified representatives from NGOs and civil
society in all regional negotiations. As part of a multilateral anti‑trafficking
strategy, advocate for the priority inclusion of child trafficking on the
agenda of the new African Union.

·Promptly investigate, prosecute
and punish perpetrators of trafficking in children, using existing penal laws
until targeted anti‑trafficking legislation is enacted. Ensure
transparency in prosecution of traffickers by maintaining a public record of
all prosecutions and the disposition of all cases. Take immediate steps to
investigate any allegations of corruption involving police officers, gendarmes,
prosecutors, members of the judiciary or anyone else involved in the
enforcement of penal laws related to child trafficking, and to prosecute
infractions.

Concerning the
recruitment of trafficked children

·As part of regional negotiations,
develop a protocol for identifying and pre‑empting potential child
traffickers, and monitor the implementation of this protocol by local bodies.
Include in the protocol information on methods used by child traffickers to
gain parental consent, such as payment and promises of education and
professional training.

·Incorporate information about
child trafficking into school curricula. Sensitize community and religious
leaders about the causes of child trafficking, the potential hazards of child
labor, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Provide information to
all personnel working with and for children, such as judges, lawyers,
magistrates, law enforcement personnel, army officials, teachers, school
administrators, health care providers, social workers, local government
officials, and personnel of child‑care institutions.

·Give priority attention to the
expansion of educational and vocational opportunities for children, especially
girls. Develop, implement and monitor programs to address disparities in
school attendance and drop‑out rates between boys and girls. Implement
public information campaigns about the potential hazards to be encountered in
domestic, market, agricultural, and factory labor. Staff local vigilance
committees with women and men who are specifically trained in educating
families about alternatives to placing children into hazardous work.

·Target orphans and other children
affected by HIV/AIDS as a vulnerable group in the context of child trafficking,
incorporating specific measures to protect orphans and AIDS‑affected
children into the national plan of action against child trafficking.
Strengthen programs to combat discriminatory practices toward children infected
with or affected by HIV/AIDS.

Concerning the
transport of trafficked children

·In cooperation with neighboring
countries, reinforce border controls at both official crossings and border
areas used for the clandestine movement of children. Station anti‑trafficking
units in towns and villages where children being trafficked are known to
congregate in transit. As part of regional negotiations, establish protocols
to identify and apprehend child traffickers, and monitor the application of
these protocols. Promptly investigate any allegation of border guards
accepting bribes from or charging "fees" to child traffickers, and discipline
and prosecute those responsible. Enact anti‑corruption provisions into
domestic law, consistent with article 9 of the U.N. Convention Against
Transnational Organized Crime (2000).[295]

·Station officers trained in the
identification and apprehension of child traffickers at transit points where
trafficked children are known to congregate before being taken abroad.
Establish a system to ensure the safe return to their home countries of
children who have been taken abroad by intermediaries and subsequently
abandoned, including appropriate support services and access to child‑friendly
personnel.

Concerning the
commercial exploitation of trafficked children

·Promptly investigate any
complaints of hazardous child labor, and increase the inspection, enforcement
and monitoring capacity of ministries of labor with respect to child labor.
Enact specific regulations governing minimum age of employment, hours of work,
hazards unique to child labor such as use of dangerous equipment, forms of
labor likely to be injurious to children, corporal punishment, entitlement to
rest and leisure, and compensation. Design and implement sensitization
campaigns for the agricultural sector as well as for those who employ domestic
workers, and prosecute those who violate minimum employment standards.

·Take all appropriate law
enforcement measures against perpetrators of physical and/or sexual violence
against child domestic workers. Develop public information campaigns about the
prevalence of abuse against domestic workers. Ensure care and support to
children who escape domestic labor and who have suffered physical or sexual
violence, including treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.

Concerning the safe
return and reintegration of trafficked children

·As part of regional negotiations,
develop and implement a consistent regional protocol for the return,
repatriation and rehabilitation of trafficked children, through collaboration
between "sending," "receiving" and "transit" countries, local NGOs,
multilateral organizations such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
and ILO, children and parents. Enact regulations providing trafficked children
with the full range of protections outlined in article 6 of the U.N.
Trafficking Protocol, article 7 of ILO Convention No. 182, article 8 of the
Optional Protocol to the Convention of the Rights of the Child on the Sale of
Children, and NGO documents such as the Human Rights Standards for the
Treatment of Trafficked Persons.

·Establish protocols for police
officers, gendarmes, other state officials and outreach workers to follow when
children who claim to have been trafficked seek their help, including the safe
delivery home or to a place of safety, and monitor the application of those protocols.
Establish centralized public registers of all trafficked children and their
whereabouts, with the oversight of the children's court or analogous
institution, where this exists. Ensure that any money owed to children by
employers is received by them through the formation of a trust or other legal
mechanism.

·Release any child who has been
placed in detention for legal transgressions arising from their having been
trafficked, and provide special protection measures in accordance with the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, specialized anti‑trafficking
instruments, and national law. Enact an explicit prohibition against the
detention of trafficked children in punitive institutions.

·Effectively monitor the progress
of all formerly trafficked children and ensure they are not retrafficked.
Ensure appropriate care and support for children whose parents are complicit in
child trafficking or are otherwise abusive or negligent. Develop a protocol
for finding appropriate foster care or, if necessary, institutional placement
for such children. Promote alternative means of livelihood for children at
risk of school drop‑out.

·Protect the safety of trafficked
children by enacting strong witness protection provisions. Ensure that
trafficked children who provide testimony in criminal proceedings have an
opportunity to do so in a child‑friendly environment, such as outside of
a formal courtroom setting.

·For purposes of program planning
and evaluation, develop a system of monitoring the incidence of child
trafficking and the government response. Maintain a database of trafficked
children's demographic information and family backgrounds, methods of
recruitment, relationships to intermediaries, modes of transport abroad, types
of work abroad, lengths of stay, methods of escape, and methods of return
and/or rehabilitation. Share relevant data with governments of other countries
affected by child trafficking.

To the Government of
Togo

In
addition to those recommendations directed at all West African countries
implicated in the trafficking of children, the government of Togo should:

·Modify provisions of the draft
Children's Code imposing prison sentences on parents who aid child traffickers,
fail to report child trafficking or offer children for sale. Create an
explicit defense for parents who are genuinely deceived about the purpose of
their child's recruitment, believing it to be educational or otherwise non‑exploitative.
Allow for reduced penalties for parents who reasonably but mistakenly believe
that aiding and abetting child trafficking, or failing to report child
traffickers to the police, is in their child's best interests.

·Ensure the legally guaranteed free
and accessible primary education for all children as provided in article 28 of
the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Implement measures to improve
school enrolment and retention, and develop a system for the regular evaluation
of the effectiveness of these interventions. Promptly investigate cases of
children being expelled from school for inability to pay fees or for school
supplies. Monitor the activity of potential child traffickers on or near
school grounds.

To Donors Supporting
these Governments

·Increase support for targeted anti‑trafficking
initiatives by specific government departments and nongovernmental
organizations. Develop a system for measuring concretely the effectiveness of
anti‑trafficking initiatives. Strengthen the capacity of NGOs to receive
and care for trafficked children by providing training on pertinent gender issues
and appropriate resources to prevent overcrowding of transit centers. Pressure
national governments to provide support to effective NGO initiatives.

·Provide anti‑trafficking
support to countries of transit and those "receiving" Togolese children (such
as Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon) as well as countries
"sending" children to Togo (such as Ghana, Benin and Nigeria). Refrain from
using any suspensions of development assistance as an excuse for not taking an
active role in anti‑trafficking efforts.[296]

·Monitor whether anti‑trafficking
programs address human rights violations underlying child trafficking, in
particular discrimination against girls. Ensure that donor supported anti‑trafficking
programs are not undermined at the local level by, for example, treatment of
trafficked children as delinquents, threats of imprisonment against parents, or
discrimination against families affected by HIV/AIDS.

To the United Nations

·Facilitate the negotiation and
ratification of a regional anti‑trafficking protocol among all West
African countries. Ensure the participation of NGOs and civil society in the
negotiation and ratification process.

·To UNICEF: Formally evaluate Togo's implementation of the 1997
Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Pressure
donor countries to provide adequate resources for Togo to fulfill its
obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Make concrete
recommendations regarding the implementation of article 35 on the elimination
of child trafficking. Develop training programs on the causes, methods and
consequences of child trafficking, for implementation into school curricula.

·To UNICEF and the ILO: Provide technical assistance to the Togolese
government on the elimination of child trafficking, including an analysis of
the child trafficking provisions of the draft Children's Code. Research best
practices on the reintegration of trafficked children, and make recommendations
to Togo's National Committee for the Reception and Social Reintegration of
Child Trafficking Victims.

·To the Office for Drug Control
and Crime Prevention (ODCCP): Ensure
that efforts to prosecute and punish child traffickers respect the human rights
of trafficked children, in accordance with article 6 of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol
and relevant human rights instruments.

·To the Economic and Social
Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): Ensure that domestic legislation implementing the U.N.
Trafficking Protocol complies with the Recommended Principles and Guidelines on
Human Rights and Human Trafficking (2002).

To Multilateral
Organizations in Africa

·To the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS): Monitor
the implementation of the 2001 ECOWAS Initial Plan of Action against Trafficking
in Persons, and in particular enforce the requirement that member states
provide a biannual progress report on implementation. Evaluate these progress
reports publicly.

·To the Executive Council of the
African Union (A.U.): Call on all
member states to include anti‑trafficking policies and programs among
their top priorities on children. In collaboration with the legal department,
participate in the drafting of a subregional anti‑trafficking
convention. Through the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC),
invite the contribution of anti‑trafficking NGOs to anti‑trafficking
resolutions and initiatives.

·To the African Commission on
Human and Peoples' Rights: Include
child trafficking on the agenda at biannual meetings. Instruct experts to prepare
advisory documents on violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples'
Rights (1981), and to make recommendations as to how the Commission can assist
governments to end child trafficking.

X. CONCLUSION

This
report implicates both child traffickers and government officials in grave
abuses of the human rights of children. From the moment they promise to
provide children with schooling, vocational training and paid work, child
traffickers perpetrate horrific abuses with virtual impunity. They take
children on long journeys that cause injury, sickness and death; order them to
perform difficult and often hazardous labor; rarely compensate them for their
services; and subject them to repeated mental and physical cruelty. Sometimes
with the supposed consent of parents, traffickers keep children from their
homes for long periods of time and deny them all contact with their families.
Rarely do they fulfill their promise to provide children education,
professional training or adequate compensation for their work.

The
Togolese government's promise to take immediate and effective steps to
eradicate child trafficking rings hollow. According to international
conventions signed or ratified by Togo, an effective response to child
trafficking requires the prosecution of traffickers, the protection and
reintegration of trafficked children, and the mitigation of forces fueling the
supply of and demand for trafficked child labor. In 2001, however, Togo
arrested or detained only ten traffickers, while it detained fifty‑five
parents of children stranded in Cameroon after a boat to Gabon capsized.[297] Most of the alleged traffickers were ultimately
released for lack of evidence.[298] At the same time, border patrols in Togo failed to
prevent traffickers from traversing the country's borders, and in some cases
accepted bribes. Children who escaped or were released from hazardous labor
received inadequate protection from law enforcement officers, rendering them
vulnerable to abandonment, sex work and retrafficking.

Like
other countries in West Africa, Togo raises resource constraints as one reason
why its response to child trafficking has been so ineffective. The country's
leading anti‑trafficking official told Human Rights Watch that she needs
"many many more resources" to protect trafficked children and described her
office's budget as "a virtual budget" that "exists only on paper."[299] The director of cabinet for Togo's Department for
the Protection and Promotion of the Family and Children, Koffi Badjow Tcham,
added that "the resources are not commensurate with the problem," and that
after returning trafficked children to their communities, "it would be nice to
guarantee at least their primary education."[300] These and other officials cite suspensions of
development assistance by the United States and the European Union as reasons
why the government fails to protect the basic human rights of children.

An
examination of Togo's anti‑trafficking strategy reveals that the problem
goes far beyond resource constraints, however. The cornerstone of this
strategy is a law that would imprison the parents of trafficked children for up
to five years for simply failing to report a known trafficker to the police.
At the same time, the proposed law contains no guarantees on the reintegration
of trafficked children and their protection from further abuse and
retrafficking. The law also contains weak and insufficient language on the
prevention of trafficking, containing one provision calling for "appropriate"
prevention measures compared to six provisions on the prosecution and
punishment of perpetrators, parents and relatives.

Togo's
prevention strategy has equally failed to address the root causes behind child
trafficking. While endeavoring to raise awareness of child trafficking, the
government has paid less attention to the forces that compel parents and
children into believing-or wanting to believe-the promises of child
traffickers. These forces are not limited to poverty, but also include denial
of educational opportunity, the subordinate status of girls, and the loss of
parents to sickness and disease. Despite promising children free primary
education, the government has not delivered and has allowed children unable to
pay school fees to be expelled from school and subsequently be recruited by
child traffickers. It has neglected the plight of children trafficked
following the death of a parent, whose numbers will only swell as HIV/AIDS
spreads across West Africa.

Foreign
governments also have an obligation to address child trafficking in Togo,
whether it be through protecting children trafficked to their countries or by
contributing technical or financial assistance to Togo's anti‑trafficking
efforts. The countries implicated in this report have recognized the existence
of child trafficking in their borders, arrested or detained some traffickers,
and/or assisted in the repatriation of trafficked children to or from Togo.
However, they are no further ahead than Togo in enacting targeted anti‑trafficking
legislation, seeing prosecutions through to completion, and establishing
consistent protocols for the humane reintegration of trafficked children.
Likewise, the international community has not gone far enough in providing the
necessary financial assistance to Togo's anti‑trafficking programs.[301]

Togo
has participated in a succession of international meetings on child trafficking
and has joined other nations in renouncing the practice. It has drafted new
anti‑trafficking legislation, established committees to raise community
awareness, and repatriated children found to have been trafficked abroad.
These preliminary actions are positive, but are not commensurate with the scale
of the child trafficking problem, either in terms of the number of children
trafficked or the severity of the abuses they experience. Absent a more
sustained commitment to prevention, prosecution and protection, children will
continue to be lured from their homes, spirited across and within Togo's
borders and exploited with virtual impunity.

APPENDIX A: EXCERPTS
FROM THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

Considering that, in accordance with the principles proclaimed in
the Charter of the United Nations, recognition of the inherent dignity and of
the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the
foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Bearing in mind that the peoples of the United Nations have, in the
Charter, reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights and in the dignity
and worth of the human person, and have determined to promote social progress
and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Recognizing that the United Nations has, in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and in the International Covenants on Human Rights,
proclaimed and agreed that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms
set forth therein, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex,
language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin,
property, birth or other status,

Recalling that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care
and assistance,

Convinced that the family, as the fundamental group of society
and the natural environment for the growth and well‑being of all its
members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection
and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the
community,

Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious
development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment,
in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,

Considering that the child should be fully prepared to live an
individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals
proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular in the
spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity,

Bearing in mind that the need to extend particular care to the child
has been stated in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924
and in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted by the General
Assembly on 20 November 1959 and recognized in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in
particular in articles 23 and 24), in the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights (in particular in article 10) and in the statutes
and relevant instruments of specialized agencies and international
organizations concerned with the welfare of children, '

Bearing in mind that, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights
of the Child, "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity,
needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection,
before as well as after birth",

Recalling the provisions of the Declaration on Social and Legal
Principles relating to the Protection and Welfare of Children, with Special
Reference to Foster Placement and Adoption Nationally and Internationally; the
United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile
Justice (The Beijing Rules) ; and the Declaration on the Protection of Women
and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict,

Recognizing that, in all countries in the world, there are
children living in exceptionally difficult conditions, and that such children
need special consideration,

Taking due account of the importance of the traditions and cultural
values of each people for the protection and harmonious development of the
child,

Recognizing the importance of international co‑operation
for improving the living conditions of children in every country, in particular
in the developing countries,

Have agreed as follows:

PART I

* * *

Article 3

1. In all actions concerning
children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions,
courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best
interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.

2. States Parties undertake
to ensure the child such protection and care as is necessary for his or her
well‑being, taking into account the rights and duties of his or her
parents, legal guardians, or other individuals legally responsible for him or
her, and, to this end, shall take all appropriate legislative and
administrative measures.

3. States Parties shall
ensure that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care
or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by
competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the
number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.

* * *

Article 19

1. States Parties shall take
all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to
protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or
abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including
sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other
person who has the care of the child.

2. Such protective measures
should, as appropriate, include effective procedures for the establishment of
social programmes to provide necessary support for the child and for those who
have the care of the child, as well as for other forms of prevention and for
identification, reporting, referral, investigation, treatment and follow‑up
of instances of child maltreatment described heretofore, and, as appropriate,
for judicial involvement.

Article 20

1. A child temporarily or
permanently deprived of his or her family environment, or in whose own best
interests cannot be allowed to remain in that environment, shall be entitled to
special protection and assistance provided by the State.

2. States Parties shall in
accordance with their national laws ensure alternative care for such a child.

3. Such care could include,
inter alia, foster placement, kafalah of Islamic law, adoption or if necessary
placement in suitable institutions for the care of children. When considering
solutions, due regard shall be paid to the desirability of continuity in a child's
upbringing and to the child's ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic
background.

* * *

Article 28

1. States Parties recognize
the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right
progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:

(a) Make primary education
compulsory and available free to all;

(b) Encourage the development
of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational
education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take
appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering
financial assistance in case of need;

(c) Make higher education
accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means;

(d) Make educational and
vocational information and guidance available and accessible to all children;

(e) Take measures to
encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop‑out
rates.

* * *

Article 31

1. States Parties recognize
the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational
activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in
cultural life and the arts.

2. States Parties shall
respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and
artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal
opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.

Article 32

1. States Parties recognize
the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from
performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the
child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental,
spiritual, moral or social development.

2. States Parties shall take
legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to ensure the
implementation of the present article. To this end, and having regard to the
relevant provisions of other international instruments, States Parties shall in
particular:

(a) Provide for a minimum age
or minimum ages for admission to employment;

(b) Provide for appropriate
regulation of the hours and conditions of employment;

(c) Provide for appropriate
penalties or other sanctions to ensure the effective enforcement of the present
article.

* * *

Article 34

States Parties undertake to
protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For
these purposes, States Parties shall in particular take all appropriate
national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent:

(a) The inducement or
coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity;

(b) The exploitative use of
children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices;

(c) The exploitative use of
children in pornographic performances and materials.

Article 35

States Parties shall take all
appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the
abduction of, the sale of or traffic in children for any purpose or in any
form.

Article 36

States Parties shall protect
the child against all other forms of exploitation prejudicial to any aspects of
the child's welfare.

Article 37

States Parties shall ensure
that:

(b) No child shall be
deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention
or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be
used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period
of time;

* * *

Article 39

States Parties shall
take all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery
and social reintegration of a child victim of: any form of neglect,
exploitation, or abuse; torture or any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment; or armed conflicts. Such recovery and reintegration
shall take place in an environment which fosters the health, self‑respect
and dignity of the child.

APPENDIX B: ILO
CONVENTION NO. 182 AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Convention No. 182
concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the
Worst Forms of Child Labour

The General Conference of
the International Labour Organization,

Having been convened at Geneva by the Governing Body of the International
Labour Office, and having met in its 87th Session on 1 June 1999, and

Considering the need to adopt new instruments for the prohibition
and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, as the main priority for
national and international action, including international cooperation and
assistance, to complement the Convention and the Recommendation concerning
Minimum Age for Admission to Employment, 1973, which remain fundamental
instruments on child labour, and

Considering that the effective elimination of the worst forms of
child labour requires immediate and comprehensive action, taking into account
the importance of free basic education and the need to remove the children
concerned from all such work and to provide for their rehabilitation and social
integration while addressing the needs of their families, and

Recalling the resolution concerning the elimination of child
labour adopted by the International Labour Conference at its 83rd Session in
1996, and

Recognizing that child labour is to a great extent caused by
poverty and that the long‑term solution lies in sustained economic growth
leading to social progress, in particular poverty alleviation and universal
education, and

Recalling the Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by
the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989, and

Recalling the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and
Rights at Work and its Follow‑up, adopted by the International Labour
Conference at its 86th Session in 1998, and

Recalling that some of the worst forms of child labour are
covered by other international instruments, in particular the Forced Labour
Convention, 1930, and the United Nations Supplementary Convention on the
Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar
to Slavery, 1956, and

Having decided upon the adoption of certain proposals with regard to
child labour, which is the fourth item on the agenda of the session, and

Having determined that these proposals shall take the form of an
international Convention;

adopts this seventeenth day of June of the year one thousand
nine hundred and ninety‑nine the following Convention, which may be cited
as the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999.

Article 1

Each Member which ratifies
this Convention shall take immediate and effective measures to secure the
prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour as a matter of
urgency.

Article 2

For the purposes of this
Convention, the term child shall apply to all persons under the age of
18.

Article 3

For the purposes of this
Convention, the term the worst forms of child labour comprises:

(a) all forms of slavery or
practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children,
debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or
compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;

(b) the use, procuring or
offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for
pornographic performances;

(c) the use, procuring or
offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and
trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties;

(d) work which, by its nature
or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health,
safety or morals of children.

Article 4

1. The types of work referred
to under Article 3(d) shall be determined by national laws or regulations or by
the competent authority, after consultation with the organizations of employers
and workers concerned, taking into consideration relevant international
standards, in particular Paragraphs 3 and 4 of the Worst Forms of Child Labour
Recommendation, 1999.

2. The competent authority,
after consultation with the organizations of employers and workers concerned,
shall identify where the types of work so determined exist.

3. The list of the types of
work determined under paragraph 1 of this Article shall be periodically
examined and revised as necessary, in consultation with the organizations of
employers and workers concerned.

Article 5

Each Member shall, after
consultation with employers' and workers' organizations, establish or designate
appropriate mechanisms to monitor the implementation of the provisions giving
effect to this Convention.

Article 6

1. Each Member shall design
and implement programmes of action to eliminate as a priority the worst forms
of child labour.

2. Such programmes of action
shall be designed and implemented in consultation with relevant government
institutions and employers' and workers' organizations, taking into
consideration the views of other concerned groups as appropriate.

Article 7

1. Each Member shall take all
necessary measures to ensure the effective implementation and enforcement of
the provisions giving effect to this Convention including the provision and
application of penal sanctions or, as appropriate, other sanctions.

2. Each Member shall, taking
into account the importance of education in eliminating child labour, take
effective and time‑bound measures to:

(a) prevent the engagement of
children in the worst forms of child labour;

(b) provide the necessary and
appropriate direct assistance for the removal of children from the worst forms
of child labour and for their rehabilitation and social integration;

(c) ensure access to free
basic education, and, wherever possible and appropriate, vocational training,
for all children removed from the worst forms of child labour;

(d) identify and reach out to
children at special risk; and

(e) take account of the
special situation of girls.

3. Each Member shall
designate the competent authority responsible for the implementation of the
provisions giving effect to this Convention.

Article 8

Members shall take
appropriate steps to assist one another in giving effect to the provisions of
this Convention through enhanced international cooperation and/or assistance
including support for social and economic development, poverty eradication
programmes and universal education.

Article 9

The formal ratifications of
this Convention shall be communicated to the Director‑General of the
International Labour Office for registration.

Article 10

1. This Convention shall be
binding only upon those Members of the International Labour Organization whose
ratifications have been registered with the Director‑General of the
International Labour Office.

2. It shall come into force
12 months after the date on which the ratifications of two Members have been
registered with the Director‑General.

3. Thereafter, this
Convention shall come into force for any Member 12 months after the date on
which its ratification has been registered.

Article 11

1. A Member which has
ratified this Convention may denounce it after the expiration of ten years from
the date on which the Convention first comes into force, by an act communicated
to the Director‑General of the International Labour Office for
registration. Such denunciation shall not take effect until one year after the
date on which it is registered.

2. Each Member which has
ratified this Convention and which does not, within the year following the
expiration of the period of ten years mentioned in the preceding paragraph,
exercise the right of denunciation provided for in this Article, will be bound
for another period of ten years and, thereafter, may denounce this Convention
at the expiration of each period of ten years under the terms provided for in
this Article.

Article 12

1. The Director‑General
of the International Labour Office shall notify all Members of the
International Labour Organization of the registration of all ratifications and
acts of denunciation communicated by the Members of the Organization.

2. When notifying the Members
of the Organization of the registration of the second ratification, the
Director‑General shall draw the attention of the Members of the
Organization to the date upon which the Convention shall come into force.

Article 13

The Director‑General of
the International Labour Office shall communicate to the Secretary‑General
of the United Nations, for registration in accordance with article 102 of the
Charter of the United Nations, full particulars of all ratifications and acts
of denunciation registered by the Director‑General in accordance with the
provisions of the preceding Articles.

Article 14

At such times as it may
consider necessary, the Governing Body of the International Labour Office shall
present to the General Conference a report on the working of this Convention
and shall examine the desirability of placing on the agenda of the Conference
the question of its revision in whole or in part.

Article
15

1. Should the Conference
adopt a new Convention revising this Convention in whole or in part, then,
unless the new Convention otherwise provides ‑‑

(a) the ratification by a
Member of the new revising Convention shall ipso jure involve the immediate
denunciation of this Convention, notwithstanding the provisions of Article 11
above, if and when the new revising Convention shall have come into force;

(b) as from the date when the
new revising Convention comes into force, this Convention shall cease to be
open to ratification by the Members.

2. This Convention shall in
any case remain in force in its actual form and content for those Members which
have ratified it but have not ratified the revising Convention.

Article 16

The English and French
versions of the text of this Convention are equally authoritative.

Recommendation no. 190
concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the
Worst Forms of Child Labour

The General Conference of
the International Labour Organization,

Having been convened at Geneva by the Governing Body of the International
Labour Office, and having met in its Eighty‑seventh Session on 1 June
1999, and

Having adopted the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999, and
Having decided upon the adoption of certain proposals with regard to child
labour, which is the fourth item on the agenda of the session, and

Having determined that these proposals shall take the form of a
Recommendation supplementing the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999;

adopts this seventeenth day of June of the year one thousand
nine hundred and ninety‑nine the following Recommendation, which may be
cited as the Worst Forms of Child Labour Recommendation, 1999.

1. The provisions of this
Recommendation supplement those of the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention,
1999 (hereafter referred to as "the Convention"), and should be
applied in conjunction with them.

I. Programmes of action

2. The programmes of action
referred to in Article 6 of the Convention should be designed and implemented
as a matter of urgency, in consultation with relevant government institutions
and employers' and workers' organizations, taking into consideration the views
of the children directly affected by the worst forms of child labour, their
families and, as appropriate, other concerned groups committed to the aims of
the Convention and this Recommendation. Such programmes should aim at, inter
alia:

(a) identifying and
denouncing the worst forms of child labour;

(b) preventing the engagement
of children in or removing them from the worst forms of child labour,
protecting them from reprisals and providing for their rehabilitation and
social integration through measures which address their educational, physical
and psychological needs;

(c) giving special attention
to:

(i) younger children;

(ii) the girl child;

(iii) the problem of hidden
work situations, in which girls are at special risk;

(iv) other groups of children
with special vulnerabilities or needs;

(d) identifying, reaching out
to and working with communities where children are at special risk;

(e) informing, sensitizing
and mobilizing public opinion and concerned groups, including children and
their families.

II. Hazardous work

3. In determining the types
of work referred to under Article 3(d) of the Convention, and in identifying
where they exist, consideration should be given, inter alia, to:

(a) work which exposes
children to physical, psychological or sexual abuse;

(b) work underground, under
water, at dangerous heights or in confined spaces;

(c) work with dangerous
machinery, equipment and tools, or which involves the manual handling or
transport of heavy loads;

(d) work in an unhealthy
environment which may, for example, expose children to hazardous substances,
agents or processes, or to temperatures, noise levels, or vibrations damaging
to their health;

(e) work under particularly
difficult conditions such as work for long hours or during the night or work
where the child is unreasonably confined to the premises of the employer.

4. For the types of work
referred to under Article 3(d) of the Convention and Paragraph 3 above,
national laws or regulations or the competent authority could, after
consultation with the workers' and employers' organizations concerned,
authorize employment or work as from the age of 16 on condition that the
health, safety and morals of the children concerned are fully protected, and
that the children have received adequate specific instruction or vocational
training in the relevant branch of activity.

III. Implementation

5. (1) Detailed information
and statistical data on the nature and extent of child labour should be
compiled and kept up to date to serve as a basis for determining priorities for
national action for the abolition of child labour, in particular for the
prohibition and elimination of its worst forms as a matter of urgency.

(2) As far as possible, such
information and statistical data should include data disaggregated by sex, age
group, occupation, branch of economic activity, status in employment, school
attendance and geographical location. The importance of an effective system of
birth registration, including the issuing of birth certificates, should be
taken into account.

(3) Relevant data concerning
violations of national provisions for the prohibition and elimination of the
worst forms of child labour should be compiled and kept up to date.

6. The compilation and
processing of the information and data referred to in Paragraph 5 above should
be carried out with due regard for the right to privacy.

7. The information compiled
under Paragraph 5 above should be communicated to the International Labour
Office on a regular basis.

8. Members should establish
or designate appropriate national mechanisms to monitor the implementation of
national provisions for the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of
child labour, after consultation with employers' and workers' organizations.

9. Members should ensure that
the competent authorities which have responsibilities for implementing national
provisions for the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child
labour cooperate with each other and coordinate their activities.

10. National laws or
regulations or the competent authority should determine the persons to be held
responsible in the event of non‑compliance with national provisions for
the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour.

11. Members should, in so far
as it is compatible with national law, cooperate with international efforts
aimed at the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour as
a matter of urgency by:

(a) gathering and exchanging
information concerning criminal offences, including those involving
international networks;

(b) detecting and prosecuting
those involved in the sale and trafficking of children, or in the use,
procuring or offering of children for illicit activities, for prostitution, for
the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;

(c) registering perpetrators
of such offences.

12. Members should provide
that the following worst forms of child labour are criminal offences:

(a) all forms of slavery or
practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children,
debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or
compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;

(b) the use, procuring or
offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for
pornographic performances; and

(c) the use, procuring or
offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production
and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties, or
for activities which involve the unlawful carrying or use of firearms or other
weapons.

13. Members should ensure
that penalties including, where appropriate, criminal penalties are applied for
violations of the national provisions for the prohibition and elimination of
any type of work referred to in Article 3(d) of the Convention.

14. Members should also
provide as a matter of urgency for other criminal, civil or administrative
remedies, where appropriate, to ensure the effective enforcement of national
provisions for the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child
labour, such as special supervision of enterprises which have used the worst
forms of child labour, and, in cases of persistent violation, consideration of
temporary or permanent revoking of permits to operate.

15. Other measures aimed at
the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour might
include the following:

(a) informing, sensitizing
and mobilizing the general public, including national and local political
leaders, parliamentarians and the judiciary;

(c) providing appropriate
training for the government officials concerned, especially inspectors and law
enforcement officials, and for other relevant professionals;

(d) providing for the
prosecution in their own country of the Member's nationals who commit offences
under its national provisions for the prohibition and immediate elimination of
the worst forms of child labour even when these offences are committed in
another country;

(e) simplifying legal and
administrative procedures and ensuring that they are appropriate and prompt;

(f) encouraging the
development of policies by undertakings to promote the aims of the Convention;

(g) monitoring and giving
publicity to best practices on the elimination of child labour;

(h) giving publicity to legal
or other provisions on child labour in the different languages or dialects;

(i) establishing special
complaints procedures and making provisions to protect from discrimination and
reprisals those who legitimately expose violations of the provisions of the
Convention, as well as establishing helplines or points of contact and
ombudspersons;

(j) adopting appropriate
measures to improve the educational infrastructure and the training of teachers
to meet the needs of boys and girls;

(k) as far as possible,
taking into account in national programmes of action:

(i) the need for job creation
and vocational training for the parents and adults in the families of children
working in the conditions covered by the Convention; and

(ii) the need for sensitizing
parents to the problem of children working in such conditions.

16. Enhanced international
cooperation and/or assistance among Members for the prohibition and effective
elimination of the worst forms of child labour should complement national
efforts and may, as appropriate, be developed and implemented in consultation
with employers' and workers' organizations. Such international cooperation
and/or assistance should include:

(a) mobilizing resources for
national or international programmes;

(b) mutual legal assistance;

(c) technical assistance
including the exchange of information;

(d) support for social and
economic development, poverty eradication programmes and universal education.

APPENDIX C: OPTIONAL
PROTOCOL TO THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD ON THE SALE OF CHILDREN,
CHILD PROSTITUTION AND CHILD PORNOGRAPHY

Optional Protocol to the
Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child
Prostitution and Child Pornography

The States Parties to the
present Protocol,

Considering that, in order further to achieve the purposes of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child and the implementation of its provisions,
especially articles 1, 11, 21, 32, 33, 34, 35 and 36, it would be appropriate
to extend the measures that States Parties should undertake in order to
guarantee the protection of the child from the sale of children, child
prostitution and child pornography,

Considering also that the Convention on the Rights of the Child
recognizes the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation
and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere
with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical,
mental, spiritual, moral or social development,

Gravely concerned at the significant and increasing international
traffic in children for the purpose of the sale of children, child prostitution
and child pornography,

Deeply concerned at the
widespread and continuing practice of sex tourism, to which children are
especially vulnerable, as it directly promotes the sale of children, child
prostitution and child pornography,

Recognizing that a number of particularly vulnerable groups,
including girl children, are at greater risk of sexual exploitation and that
girl children are disproportionately represented among the sexually exploited,

Concerned about the growing availability of child pornography
on the Internet and other evolving technologies, and recalling the
International Conference on Combating Child Pornography on the Internet, held
in Vienna in 1999, in particular its conclusion calling for the worldwide
criminalization of the production, distribution, exportation, transmission,
importation, intentional possession and advertising of child pornography, and
stressing the importance of closer cooperation and partnership between
Governments and the Internet industry,

Believing also that efforts to raise public awareness are
needed to reduce consumer demand for the sale of children, child prostitution
and child pornography, and believing further in the importance of strengthening
global partnership among all actors and of improving law enforcement at the
national level,

Noting the provisions of international legal instruments
relevant to the protection of children, including the Hague Convention on
Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, the
Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the
Hague Convention on Jurisdiction, Applicable Law, Recognition, Enforcement and
Cooperation in Respect of Parental Responsibility and Measures for the
Protection of Children, and International Labour Organization Convention No.
182 on the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst
Forms of Child Labour,

Encouraged by the overwhelming support for the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, demonstrating the widespread commitment that exists for
the promotion and protection of the rights of the child,

Recognizing the importance of the implementation of the
provisions of the Programme of Action for the Prevention of the Sale of
Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and the Declaration and
Agenda for Action adopted at the World Congress against Commercial Sexual
Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm from 27 to 31 August 1996, and the
other relevant decisions and recommendations of pertinent international bodies,

Taking due account of the importance of the traditions and cultural
values of each people for the protection and harmonious development of the
child,

Have agreed
as follows:

Article 1

States Parties
shall prohibit the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography
as provided for by the present Protocol.

Article 2

For the purposes
of the present Protocol:

(a) Sale of
children means any act or transaction whereby a child is transferred by any
person or group of persons to another for remuneration or any other
consideration;

(b) Child
prostitution means the use of a child in sexual activities for remuneration or
any other form of consideration;

(c) Child
pornography means any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in
real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the
sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes.

Article 3

1. Each State Party shall
ensure that, as a minimum, the following acts and activities are fully covered
under its criminal or penal law, whether such offences are committed
domestically or transnationally or on an individual or organized basis:

(a) In the
context of sale of children as defined in article 2:

(i) Offering,
delivering or accepting, by whatever means, a child for the purpose of:

a. Sexual
exploitation of the child;

b. Transfer of
organs of the child for profit;

c. Engagement of
the child in forced labour;

(ii) Improperly
inducing consent, as an intermediary, for the adoption of a child in violation
of applicable international legal instruments on adoption;

(b) Offering,
obtaining, procuring or providing a child for child prostitution, as defined in
article 2;

2. Subject to the provisions
of the national law of a State Party, the same shall apply to an attempt to
commit any of the said acts and to complicity or participation in any of the
said acts.

3. Each State Party shall
make such offences punishable by appropriate penalties that take into account
their grave nature.

4. Subject to the provisions
of its national law, each State Party shall take measures, where appropriate,
to establish the liability of legal persons for offences established in
paragraph 1 of the present article. Subject to the legal principles of the
State Party, such liability of legal persons may be criminal, civil or
administrative.

5. States Parties shall take
all appropriate legal and administrative measures to ensure that all persons
involved in the adoption of a child act in conformity with applicable
international legal instruments.

Article 4

1. Each State Party shall
take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the
offences referred to in article 3, paragraph 1, when the offences are committed
in its territory or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State.

2. Each State Party may take
such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the
offences referred to in article 3, paragraph 1, in the following cases:

(a) When the
alleged offender is a national of that State or a person who has his habitual
residence in its territory;

(b) When the
victim is a national of that State.

3. Each State Party shall
also take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over
the aforementioned offences when the alleged offender is present in its
territory and it does not extradite him or her to another State Party on the
ground that the offence has been committed by one of its nationals.

4. The present Protocol does
not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with internal
law.

Article 5

1. The offences referred to
in article 3, paragraph 1, shall be deemed to be included as extraditable
offences in any extradition treaty existing between States Parties and shall be
included as extraditable offences in every extradition treaty subsequently
concluded between them, in accordance with the conditions set forth in such
treaties.

2. If a State Party that
makes extradition conditional on the existence of a treaty receives a request
for extradition from another State Party with which it has no extradition
treaty, it may consider the present Protocol to be a legal basis for
extradition in respect of such offences. Extradition shall be subject to the
conditions provided by the law of the requested State.

3. States Parties that do not
make extradition conditional on the existence of a treaty shall recognize such
offences as extraditable offences between themselves subject to the conditions
provided by the law of the requested State.

4. Such offences shall be
treated, for the purpose of extradition between States Parties, as if they had
been committed not only in the place in which they occurred but also in the
territories of the States required to establish their jurisdiction in
accordance with article 4.

5. If an extradition request
is made with respect to an offence described in article 3, paragraph 1, and the
requested State Party does not or will not extradite on the basis of the
nationality of the offender, that State shall take suitable measures to submit
the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.

Article 6

1. States Parties shall
afford one another the greatest measure of assistance in connection with
investigations or criminal or extradition proceedings brought in respect of the
offences set forth in article 3, paragraph 1, including assistance in obtaining
evidence at their disposal necessary for the proceedings.

2. States Parties shall carry
out their obligations under paragraph 1 of the present article in conformity
with any treaties or other arrangements on mutual legal assistance that may
exist between them. In the absence of such treaties or arrangements, States
Parties shall afford one another assistance in accordance with their domestic
law.

Article 7

States Parties
shall, subject to the provisions of their national law:

(a) Take measures
to provide for the seizure and confiscation, as appropriate, of:

(i) Goods, such
as materials, assets and other instrumentalities used to commit or facilitate
offences under the present protocol;

(ii) Proceeds
derived from such offences;

(b) Execute
requests from another State Party for seizure or confiscation of goods or
proceeds referred to in subparagraph (a) (i) and (ii);

(c) Take measures
aimed at closing, on a temporary or definitive basis, premises used to commit
such offences.

Article 8

1. States Parties shall adopt
appropriate measures to protect the rights and interests of child victims of
the practices prohibited under the present Protocol at all stages of the
criminal justice process, in particular by:

(a) Recognizing
the vulnerability of child victims and adapting procedures to recognize their
special needs, including their special needs as witnesses;

(b) Informing
child victims of their rights, their role and the scope, timing and progress of
the proceedings and of the disposition of their cases;

(c) Allowing the
views, needs and concerns of child victims to be presented and considered in
proceedings where their personal interests are affected, in a manner consistent
with the procedural rules of national law;

(d) Providing
appropriate support services to child victims throughout the legal process;

(e) Protecting,
as appropriate, the privacy and identity of child victims and taking measures
in accordance with national law to avoid the inappropriate dissemination of
information that could lead to the identification of child victims;

(f) Providing, in
appropriate cases, for the safety of child victims, as well as that of their
families and witnesses on their behalf, from intimidation and retaliation;

(g) Avoiding
unnecessary delay in the disposition of cases and the execution of orders or decrees
granting compensation to child victims.

2. States Parties shall
ensure that uncertainty as to the actual age of the victim shall not prevent
the initiation of criminal investigations, including investigations aimed at
establishing the age of the victim.

3. States Parties shall
ensure that, in the treatment by the criminal justice system of children who
are victims of the offences described in the present Protocol, the best
interest of the child shall be a primary consideration.

4. States Parties shall take
measures to ensure appropriate training, in particular legal and psychological
training, for the persons who work with victims of the offences prohibited
under the present Protocol.

5. States Parties shall, in
appropriate cases, adopt measures in order to protect the safety and integrity
of those persons and/or organizations involved in the prevention and/or
protection and rehabilitation of victims of such offences.

6. Nothing in the present
article shall be construed to be prejudicial to or inconsistent with the rights
of the accused to a fair and impartial trial.

Article 9

1. States Parties shall adopt
or strengthen, implement and disseminate laws, administrative measures, social
policies and programmes to prevent the offences referred to in the present
Protocol. Particular attention shall be given to protect children who are
especially vulnerable to such practices.

2. States Parties shall
promote awareness in the public at large, including children, through
information by all appropriate means, education and training, about the
preventive measures and harmful effects of the offences referred to in the
present Protocol. In fulfilling their obligations under this article, States
Parties shall encourage the participation of the community and, in particular,
children and child victims, in such information and education and training
programmes, including at the international level.

3. States Parties shall take
all feasible measures with the aim of ensuring all appropriate assistance to victims
of such offences, including their full social reintegration and their full
physical and psychological recovery.

4. States Parties shall
ensure that all child victims of the offences described in the present Protocol
have access to adequate procedures to seek, without discrimination,
compensation for damages from those legally responsible.

5. States Parties shall take
appropriate measures aimed at effectively prohibiting the production and
dissemination of material advertising the offences described in the present
Protocol.

Article 10

1. States Parties shall take
all necessary steps to strengthen international cooperation by multilateral,
regional and bilateral arrangements for the prevention, detection,
investigation, prosecution and punishment of those responsible for acts
involving the sale of children, child prostitution, child pornography and child
sex tourism. States Parties shall also promote international cooperation and
coordination between their authorities, national and international non‑governmental
organizations and international organizations.

2. States Parties shall
promote international cooperation to assist child victims in their physical and
psychological recovery, social reintegration and repatriation.

3. States Parties shall
promote the strengthening of international cooperation in order to address the
root causes, such as poverty and underdevelopment, contributing to the
vulnerability of children to the sale of children, child prostitution, child
pornography and child sex tourism.

4. States Parties in a
position to do so shall provide financial, technical or other assistance
through existing multilateral, regional, bilateral or other programmes.

Article 11

Nothing in the present
Protocol shall affect any provisions that are more conducive to the realization
of the rights of the child and that may be contained in:

(a) The law of a
State Party;

(b) International
law in force for that State.

Article 12

1. Each State Party shall,
within two years following the entry into force of the present Protocol for
that State Party, submit a report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child
providing comprehensive information on the measures it has taken to implement
the provisions of the Protocol.

2. Following the submission of
the comprehensive report, each State Party shall include in the reports they
submit to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, in accordance with article
44 of the Convention, any further information with respect to the
implementation of the present Protocol. Other States Parties to the Protocol
shall submit a report every five years.

3. The Committee on the
Rights of the Child may request from States Parties further information
relevant to the implementation of the present Protocol.

Article 13

1. The present Protocol is
open for signature by any State that is a party to the Convention or has signed
it.

2. The present Protocol is
subject to ratification and is open to accession by any State that is a party
to the Convention or has signed it. Instruments of ratification or accession
shall be deposited with the Secretary‑ General of the United Nations.

Article 14

1. The present Protocol shall
enter into force three months after the deposit of the tenth instrument of
ratification or accession.

2. For each State ratifying
the present Protocol or acceding to it after its entry into force, the Protocol
shall enter into force one month after the date of the deposit of its own
instrument of ratification or accession.

Article 15

1. Any State Party may
denounce the present Protocol at any time by written notification to the
Secretary‑ General of the United Nations, who shall thereafter inform the
other States Parties to the Convention and all States that have signed the
Convention. The denunciation shall take effect one year after the date of
receipt of the notification by the Secretary‑General.

2. Such a denunciation shall
not have the effect of releasing the State Party from its obligations under the
present Protocol in regard to any offence that occurs prior to the date on
which the denunciation becomes effective. Nor shall such a denunciation
prejudice in any way the continued consideration of any matter that is already
under consideration by the Committee on the Rights of the Child prior to the date
on which the denunciation becomes effective.

Article 16

1. Any State Party may
propose an amendment and file it with the Secretary‑General of the United
Nations. The Secretary‑General shall thereupon communicate the proposed
amendment to States Parties with a request that they indicate whether they
favour a conference of States Parties for the purpose of considering and voting
upon the proposals. In the event that, within four months from the date of such
communication, at least one third of the States Parties favour such a
conference, the Secretary‑General shall convene the conference under the
auspices of the United Nations. Any amendment adopted by a majority of States
Parties present and voting at the conference shall be submitted to the General
Assembly of the United Nations for approval.

2. An amendment adopted in
accordance with paragraph 1 of the present article shall enter into force when
it has been approved by the General Assembly and accepted by a two‑thirds
majority of States Parties.

3. When an amendment enters
into force, it shall be binding on those States Parties that have accepted it,
other States Parties still being bound by the provisions of the present
Protocol and any earlier amendments they have accepted.

Article 17

1. The present Protocol, of
which the Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts are
equally authentic, shall be deposited in the archives of the United Nations.

2. The Secretary‑General
of the United Nations shall transmit certified copies of the present Protocol
to all States Parties to the Convention and all States that have signed the
Convention.

APPENDIX D: PROTOCOL
TO THE U.N. CONVENTION ON TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME TO SUPPRESS, PREVENT
AND PUNISH THE TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS, ESPECIALLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN

Protocol to Suppress,
Prevent and Punish the Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children,
Supplementing the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime

PREAMBLE

The States Parties to this
Protocol,

Declaring that effective action to prevent
and combat trafficking in persons,
especially women and children, requires a comprehensive international approach
in the countries of origin, transit and destination that includes measures to prevent such trafficking, to punish the traffickers and to protect the victims of such trafficking, including by protecting their internationally
recognized human rights,

Taking into account the fact that, despite the existence of a variety of
international instruments containing rules and practical measures to combat the
exploitation of persons, especially
women and children,
there is no universal instrument that addresses all aspects of trafficking in persons,

Concerned that, in the absence of such an instrument, persons who are vulnerable to trafficking
will not be sufficiently protected,

Recalling General Assembly resolution 53/111 of 9 December
1998, in which the Assembly decided to establish an open‑ended
intergovernmental ad hoc committee for the purpose of elaborating a comprehensive
international convention against transnational organized crime and of
discussing the elaboration of, inter alia, an international instrument
addressing trafficking in women
and children,

Convinced that supplementing the United Nations Convention
against Transnational Organized Crime with an international instrument for the
prevention, suppression and punishment of trafficking
in persons, especially women and children, will be
useful in preventing and combating that crime,

Have agreed as follows:

I. GENERAL PROVISIONS

Article 1

Relation with the United Nations Convention

against Transnational Organized Crime

1. This Protocol
supplements the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized
Crime. It shall be interpreted together with the Convention.

3. The offences established
in accordance with article 5 of this Protocol shall
be regarded as offences established in accordance with the Convention.

Article 2

Statement of purpose

The purposes of this Protocol are:

(a) To prevent
and combat trafficking in persons,
paying particular attention to women and children;

(b) To protect and assist the
victims of such trafficking, with full respect for
their human rights; and

(c) To promote cooperation
among States Parties in order to meet those objectives.

Article 3

Use of terms

For the purposes of this Protocol:

(a) "Trafficking
in persons" shall mean the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons,
by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of
abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of
vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve
the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of
exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the
prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or
services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of
organs;

(b) The consent of a victim
of trafficking in persons
to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article
shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have
been used;

(c) The recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of
exploitation shall be considered "trafficking in
persons" even if this does not involve any of
the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;

(d) "Child" shall
mean any person under eighteen years of age.

Article 4

Scope of application

This Protocol
shall apply, except as otherwise stated herein, to the prevention,
investigation and prosecution of the offences established in accordance with
article 5 of this Protocol, where those offences are
transnational in nature and involve an organized criminal group, as well as to
the protection of victims of such offences.

Article 5

Criminalization

1. Each State Party shall
adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as
criminal offences the conduct set forth in article 3 of this Protocol, when committed intentionally.

2. Each State Party shall
also adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish
as criminal offences:

(a) Subject to the basic
concepts of its legal system, attempting to commit an offence established in
accordance with paragraph 1 of this article;

(b) Participating as an
accomplice in an offence established in accordance with paragraph 1 of this
article; and

(c) Organizing or directing
other persons to commit an offence established in
accordance with paragraph 1 of this article.

II. PROTECTION OF VICTIMS OF TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS

Article 6

Assistance to and protection of victims of trafficking in persons

1. In appropriate cases and
to the extent possible under its domestic law, each State Party shall protect
the privacy and identity of victims of trafficking in
persons, including, inter alia, by making legal
proceedings relating to such trafficking
confidential.

2. Each State Party shall
ensure that its domestic legal or administrative system contains measures that
provide to victims of trafficking in persons, in appropriate cases:

(a) Information on relevant
court and administrative proceedings;

(b) Assistance to enable
their views and concerns to be presented and considered at appropriate stages
of criminal proceedings against offenders, in a manner not prejudicial to the
rights of the defence.

3. Each State Party shall
consider implementing measures to provide for the physical, psychological and
social recovery of victims of trafficking in persons, including, in appropriate cases, in cooperation
with non‑governmental organizations, other relevant organizations and
other elements of civil society, and, in particular, the provision of:

(a) Appropriate housing;

(b) Counselling and
information, in particular as regards their legal rights, in a language that the
victims of trafficking in persons
can understand;

(c) Medical, psychological
and material assistance; and

(d) Employment, educational
and training opportunities.

4. Each State Party shall
take into account, in applying the provisions of this article, the age, gender
and special needs of victims of trafficking in persons, in particular the special needs of children, including appropriate housing, education and
care.

5. Each State Party shall
endeavour to provide for the physical safety of victims of trafficking
in persons while they are within its territory.

6. Each State Party shall
ensure that its domestic legal system contains measures that offer victims of trafficking in persons the
possibility of obtaining compensation for damage suffered.

Article 7

Status of victims of trafficking
in persons in receiving States

1. In addition to taking
measures pursuant to article 6 of this Protocol, each
State Party shall consider adopting legislative or other appropriate measures
that permit victims of trafficking in persons to remain in its territory, temporarily or
permanently, in appropriate cases.

2. In implementing the
provision contained in paragraph 1 of this article, each State Party shall give
appropriate consideration to humanitarian and compassionate factors.

Article 8

Repatriation of victims of trafficking
in persons

1. The State Party of which a
victim of trafficking in persons
is a national or in which the person had the right of permanent residence at
the time of entry into the territory of the receiving State Party shall
facilitate and accept, with due regard for the safety of that person, the
return of that person without undue or unreasonable delay.

2. When a State Party returns
a victim of trafficking in persons
to a State Party of which that person is a national or in which he or she had,
at the time of entry into the territory of the receiving State Party, the right
of permanent residence, such return shall be with due regard for the safety of
that person and for the status of any legal proceedings related to the fact
that the person is a victim of trafficking and shall
preferably be voluntary.

3. At the request of a
receiving State Party, a requested State Party shall, without undue or
unreasonable delay, verify whether a person who is a victim of trafficking in persons is its
national or had the right of permanent residence in its territory at the time
of entry into the territory of the receiving State Party.

4. In order to facilitate the
return of a victim of trafficking in persons who is without proper documentation, the State
Party of which that person is a national or in which he or she had the right of
permanent residence at the time of entry into the territory of the receiving
State Party shall agree to issue, at the request of the receiving State Party,
such travel documents or other authorization as may be necessary to enable the
person

to travel to and re‑enter
its territory.

5. This article shall be
without prejudice to any right afforded to victims of trafficking
in persons by any domestic law of the receiving State
Party.

6. This article shall be
without prejudice to any applicable bilateral or multilateral agreement or
arrangement that governs, in whole or in part, the return of victims of trafficking in persons.

(b) To protect victims of trafficking in persons, especially women and children, from revictimization.

2. States Parties shall
endeavour to undertake measures such as research, information and mass media
campaigns and social and economic initiatives to prevent
and combat trafficking in persons.

3. Policies, programmes and
other measures established in accordance with this article shall, as
appropriate, include cooperation with non‑governmental organizations,
other relevant organizations and other elements of civil society.

4. States Parties shall take
or strengthen measures, including through bilateral or multilateral
cooperation, to alleviate the factors that make persons,
especially women and children, vulnerable to trafficking,
such as poverty, underdevelopment and lack of equal opportunity.

5. States Parties shall adopt
or strengthen legislative or other measures, such as educational, social or
cultural measures, including through bilateral and multilateral cooperation, to
discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to
trafficking.

Article 10

Information exchange and training

1. Law enforcement,
immigration or other relevant authorities of States Parties shall, as
appropriate, cooperate with one another by exchanging information, in
accordance with their domestic law, to enable them to determine:

(a) Whether individuals
crossing or attempting to cross an international border with travel documents
belonging to other persons or without travel documents
are perpetrators or victims of trafficking in persons;

(b) The types of travel
document that individuals have used or attempted to use to cross an
international border for the purpose of trafficking
in persons; and

(c) The means and methods
used by organized criminal groups for the purpose of trafficking
in persons, including the recruitment and
transportation of victims, routes and links between and among individuals and
groups engaged in such trafficking, and possible
measures for detecting them.

2. States Parties shall
provide or strengthen training for law enforcement, immigration and other
relevant officials in the prevention of trafficking
in persons. The training should focus on methods used
in preventing such trafficking, prosecuting the
traffickers and protecting the rights of the victims, including protecting the
victims from the traffickers. The training should also take into account the
need to consider human rights and child‑ and gender‑sensitive
issues and it should encourage cooperation with non‑governmental
organizations, other relevant organizations and other elements of civil
society.

3. A State Party that
receives information shall comply with any request by the State Party that
transmitted the information that places restrictions on its use.

Article 11

Border measures

1. Without prejudice to
international commitments in relation to the free movement of people, States
Parties shall strengthen, to the extent possible, such border controls as may
be necessary to prevent and detect trafficking in persons.

2. Each State Party shall
adopt legislative or other appropriate measures to prevent,
to the extent possible, means of transport operated by commercial carriers from
being used in the commission of offences established in accordance with article
5 of this Protocol.

3. Where appropriate, and
without prejudice to applicable international conventions, such measures shall
include establishing the obligation of commercial carriers, including any
transportation company or the owner or operator of any means of transport, to
ascertain that all passengers are in possession of the travel documents
required for entry into the receiving State.

4. Each State Party shall
take the necessary measures, in accordance with its domestic law, to provide
for sanctions in cases of violation of the obligation set forth in paragraph 3
of this article.

5. Each State Party shall
consider taking measures that permit, in accordance with its domestic law, the
denial of entry or revocation of visas of persons
implicated in the commission of offences established in accordance with this Protocol.

6. Without prejudice to
article 27 of the Convention, States Parties shall consider strengthening
cooperation among border control agencies by, inter alia, establishing and
maintaining direct channels of communication.

Article 12

Security and control of documents

Each State Party shall take
such measures as may be necessary, within available means:

(a) To ensure that travel or
identity documents issued by it are of such quality that they cannot easily be
misused and cannot readily be falsified or unlawfully altered, replicated or
issued; and

(b) To ensure the integrity
and security of travel or identity documents issued by or on behalf of the
State Party and to prevent their unlawful creation,
issuance and use.

Article 13

Legitimacy and validity of documents

At the request of another
State Party, a State Party shall, in accordance with its domestic law, verify
within a reasonable time the legitimacy and validity of travel or identity
documents issued or purported to have been issued in its name and suspected of
being used for trafficking in persons.

IV. FINAL PROVISIONS

Article 14

Saving clause

1. Nothing in this Protocol shall affect the rights, obligations and
responsibilities of States and individuals under international law, including
international humanitarian law and international human rights law and, in
particular, where applicable, the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees and the
principle of non‑refoulement as contained therein.

2. The measures set forth in
this Protocol shall be interpreted and applied in a
way that is not discriminatory to persons on the
ground that they are victims of trafficking in persons. The interpretation and application of those
measures shall be consistent with internationally recognized principles of non‑discrimination.

Article 15

Settlement of disputes

l. States Parties shall
endeavour to settle disputes concerning the interpretation or application of
this Protocol through negotiation.

2. Any dispute between two or
more States Parties concerning the interpretation or application of this Protocol that cannot be settled through negotiation within
a reasonable time shall, at the request of one of those States Parties, be
submitted to arbitration. If, six months after the date of the request for
arbitration, those States Parties are unable to agree on the organization of
the arbitration, any one of those States Parties may refer the dispute to the
International Court of Justice by request in accordance with the Statute of the
Court.

3. Each State Party may, at
the time of signature, ratification, acceptance or approval of or accession to
this Protocol, declare that it does not consider
itself bound by paragraph 2 of this article. The other States Parties shall not
be bound by paragraph 2 of this article with respect to any State Party that
has made such a reservation.

4. Any State Party that has
made a reservation in accordance with paragraph 3 of this article may at any
time withdraw that reservation by notification to the Secretary‑General
of the United Nations.

Article 16

Signature, ratification, acceptance, approval and
accession

1. This Protocol
shall be open to all States for signature from 12 to 15 December 2000 in
Palermo, Italy, and thereafter at United Nations Headquarters in New York until
12 December 2002.

2. This Protocol
shall also be open for signature by regional economic integration organizations
provided that at least one member State of such organization has signed this Protocol in accordance with paragraph 1 of this article.

3. This Protocol
is subject to ratification, acceptance or approval. Instruments of
ratification, acceptance or approval shall be deposited with the Secretary‑General
of the United Nations. A regional economic integration organization may deposit
its instrument of ratification, acceptance or approval if at least one of its
member States has done likewise. In that instrument of ratification, acceptance
or approval, such organization shall declare the extent of its competence with
respect to the matters governed by this Protocol.
Such organization shall also inform the depositary of any relevant modification
in the extent of its competence.

4. This Protocol
is open for accession by any State or any regional economic integration
organization of which at least one member State is a Party to this Protocol. Instruments of accession shall be deposited with
the Secretary‑General of the United Nations. At the time of its
accession, a regional economic integration organization shall declare the
extent of its competence with respect to matters governed by this Protocol. Such organization shall also inform the
depositary of any relevant modification in the extent of its competence.

Article 17

Entry into force

1. This Protocol
shall enter into force on the ninetieth day after the date of deposit of the
fortieth instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, except
that it shall not enter into force before the entry into force of the
Convention. For the purpose of this paragraph, any instrument deposited by a
regional economic integration organization shall not be counted as additional
to those deposited by member States of such organization.

2. For each State or regional
economic integration organization ratifying, accepting, approving or acceding
to this Protocol after the deposit of the fortieth
instrument of such action, this Protocol shall enter
into force on the thirtieth day after the date of deposit by such State or
organization of the relevant instrument or on the date this Protocol
enters into force pursuant to paragraph 1 of this article, whichever is the
later.

Article 18

Amendment

1. After the expiry of five
years from the entry into force of this Protocol, a
State Party to the Protocol may propose an amendment
and file it with the Secretary‑General of the United Nations, who shall
thereupon communicate the proposed amendment to the States Parties and to the
Conference of the Parties to the Convention for the purpose of considering and
deciding on the proposal. The States Parties to this Protocol
meeting at the Conference of the Parties shall make every effort to achieve
consensus on each amendment. If all efforts at consensus have been exhausted
and no agreement has been reached, the amendment shall, as a last resort,
require for its adoption a two‑thirds majority vote of the States Parties
to this Protocol present and voting at the meeting of
the Conference of the Parties.

2. Regional economic
integration organizations, in matters within their competence, shall exercise
their right to vote under this article with a number of votes equal to the
number of their member States that are Parties to this Protocol.
Such organizations shall not exercise their right to vote if their member
States exercise theirs and vice versa.

3. An amendment adopted in
accordance with paragraph 1 of this article is subject to ratification,
acceptance or approval by States Parties.

4. An amendment adopted in
accordance with paragraph 1 of this article shall enter into force in respect
of a State Party ninety days after the date of the deposit with the Secretary‑General
of the United Nations of an instrument of ratification, acceptance or approval of
such amendment.

5. When an amendment enters
into force, it shall be binding on those States Parties which have expressed
their consent to be bound by it. Other States Parties shall still be bound by
the provisions of this Protocol and any earlier amendments
that they have ratified, accepted or approved.

Article 19

Denunciation

1. A State Party may denounce
this Protocol by written notification to the
Secretary‑General of the United Nations. Such denunciation shall become
effective one year after the date of receipt of the notification by the
Secretary‑General.

2. A regional economic
integration organization shall cease to be a Party to this Protocol
when all of its member States have denounced it.

Article 20

Depositary and languages

1. The Secretary‑General
of the United Nations is designated depositary of this Protocol.

2. The original of this Protocol, of which the Arabic, Chinese, English, French,
Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall be deposited with the
Secretary‑General of the United Nations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This
report is based on research conducted by Jonathan Cohen and Joanne Csete,
respectively researcher with and director of Human Rights Watch's Program on
HIV/AIDS and Human Rights. The research is a joint project of the HIV/AIDS and
Human Rights Program and the Children's Rights Division. We wish to thank our
colleagues in Togo, who tirelessly defend the rights of children, for their
assistance. We also wish to thank those who took the time to speak with us, in
particular the trafficked boys and girls who had the courage and fortitude to
recount their stories.

This
report was written by Jonathan Cohen. It was reviewed by Joanne Csete; Lois
Whitman, director of the Children's Rights Division; Bronwen Manby, deputy
director of the Africa Division; Dinah PoKempner, General Counsel; and Ian
Gorvin, consultant to the Program Office of Human Rights Watch. Production
assistance was provided by Tommy Yeh, Patrick Minges, and Veronica Matushaj.
Anne Fonteneau translated the report into French.

We acknowledge with gratitude
the financial support of the Oak Foundation, the Independence Foundation, the
Ruben and Elisabeth Rausing Trust, the John M. Lloyd Foundation, and two
generous anonymous donors.

[1]
To protect the identities of trafficked children, their real names are not used
in this report.

[2]
The CFA franc (CFA), or franc of the African Financial Community, is the common
currency of fourteen African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central
African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Côte
d'Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. As of this writing, one U.S. dollar
was worth approximately 675 CFA.

[4]
These countries are implicated by testimony in this report; however, within the
West Africa region the ILO has also documented child trafficking in Burkina
Faso, Cameroon and Mali.

[5] A gendarme is a
member of the armed security forces with responsibility for general law
enforcement.

[6]
For administrative purposes, Togo is divided into thirty-two prefectures, each
with a prefect appointed by the president on the recommendation of the minister
of the interior. Prefectures are further subdivided by canton, village,
neighborhood, tribe, clan and family.

[7]
United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish the Trafficking of
Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations
Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (2000), art. 3 (not yet in
force). The Protocol defines a child as any person under eighteen years of age
(art. 3(d)) and defines "exploitation" as including "at a minimum, the
exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual
exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to
slavery, servitude or the removal of organs" (art. 3(a)). The Convention on
the Rights of the Child defines children as "Every human being under the age of
eighteen years unless, under law applicable to the child, majority is obtained
earlier." Convention on the Rights of the Child, art. 1, G.A. Res. 44/25,
annex, 44 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 49) at 167, U.N. Doc. A/44/49 (1989). Human
Rights Watch considers anyone under the age of eighteen to be a child.

[8]
A narrower definition of child trafficking, agreed upon at the 2002 First
Specialized Meeting on Child Trafficking and Exploitation in West and Central
Africa, is "a phenomenon where an individual (called an intermediary), for a
fee and through violence or ruse, displaces within or outside a national
territory an individual less than eighteen years old for sexual or commercial
exploitation, generally with the complicity of the parents." First Specialized
Meeting on the trafficking and exploitation of children in west and central
Africa, "Rapport de Synthèse" (Yamoussoukro: January 8-10, 2002), p. 6.

[9]
See Trafficking Protocol, article 3. The term "forced labor" is defined in
article 2.1 of ILO Convention No. 29 Concerning Forced Labour as "all work or
service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and
for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily." The term
"slavery" is defined in article 1.1 of the U.N. Slavery Convention as "the
status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to
the right of ownership are exercised." Practices similar to slavery are
defined in article 1 of the U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of
Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery to
include, among other things, debt bondage and serfdom. Servitude is not
defined in international law, but it is understood that the above practices are
forms of servitude.

[10]
Development assistance from the European Union has been frozen since 1993,
while overall aid from the United States amounts to about eighty Peace Corps
volunteers, and health and nutrition programs valued at about U.S.$8,000,000.
See U.S. State Department's 2002 Background Note for Togo at
www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5430.htm (accessed July 28, 2002).

[17]
"West and Central Africa: United Nations Integrated Regional Information
Network (IRIN) focus on regional efforts against child trafficking," IRIN,
March 27, 2002, at www.irinnews.org/print/asp?ReportID=19693 (accessed March 27,
2002), p. 2. At the time of the meeting and her subsequent interviews with
Human Rights Watch, Aho was Togo's director of the Department for the
Protection and Promotion of the Family and Children, which is part of the
Ministry of Social Affairs. In 2002, she was appointed Minister of Public
Health, Promotion of Women and Child Protection.

[19]
Compare Human Rights Watch interview with Suzanne Aho with E.M. Abalo,
"Problématique du trafic des enfants au Togo: Rapport d'enquête" (Lomé:
ILO-IPEC, 2000), p. viii. According to the U.S. State Department, the
government estimate was 750 children trafficked in 1999. U.S. State
Department's 2001 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, p. 17.

[20]
Abalo, "Trafic des enfants au Togo," p. viii. The first case recorded by a
Togolese NGO was in 1995, when a five-year-old child who was about to be sold
in Benin for 15,000 CFA (U.S.$22) was intercepted and brought to the NGO Terre
des Hommes. Abalo, "Trafic des enfants au Togo," note 3. The earliest case
documented by Human Rights Watch as part of the research reported here is from
1993, when a three-year-old girl was trafficked to Nigeria from the village of
Hahatoe. Human Rights Watch interview, Hahatoe, May 11, 2002.

[33]
R. Salah, "Child Trafficking in West and Central Africa: An Overview" (paper
presented at the first Pan-African conference on human trafficking organized by
the Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF),
February 19-23, 2001), p. 4.

[34]
L. Bazzi-Veil, "Étude sous-régionale sur le trafic des enfants à des fins
d'exploitation économique en Afrique de l'Ouest et du Centre" (Abidjan: UNICEF
West and Central Africa Regional Office (WCARO), 2000), p. 9; United Nations
Development Program's 2002 Human Development Report, retrieved from
www.undp.org/hdr2002/complete.pdf on August 6, 2002. Poverty rates tend to be
much higher in rural areas, as in Togo where the general poverty rate is 35
percent but the rate in rural areas is 78 percent. Abalo, "Trafic des enfants
au Togo," p. iii. The links between poverty and child trafficking have been
the subject of numerous studies and journalistic accounts. Poverty has been
said to force families to find ways to reduce childcare costs; tempt children
into seeking a better life abroad; and draw rural families to higher wages in
urban areas. It has also been said to compel farmers to employ their children
in the fields, leading to high rates of school drop-out and heightened
vulnerability to recruitment by trafficking intermediaries. Poverty is also
thought to contribute to the employment of girls as domestic workers, itself a
potential forerunner to child trafficking. See R. Salah, "Child
Trafficking," p. 4; UNICEF-WCARO, "Workshop on Trafficking in Child Domestic
Workers," p. 30; Bazzi-Veil, "Trafic des enfants en Afrique de l'Ouest et du
Centre," p. 8; Boonpala and Kane, "Trafficking of Children," pp. 20-21;
ILO-IPEC, "Synthesis report," pp. 13-14, 31; Abalo, "Trafic des enfants au
Togo," p. xix; U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, "Trafficking
for forced labour," public service announcement, retrieved from
www.odccp.org/multimedia.html on June 27, 2002; journalistic accounts listed
above.

[37]
Ibid., p. xvii. 71 percent of parents had between five and eight children, and
11 percent had more than eight children.

[38]
Human Rights Watch interview with Kodjo Djissenou, executive director, La
Conscience, May 18, 2002. In 1996, the World Bank noted that "cost is one of
the main reasons why the poor do not send their children to school. While
school fees are low, school supplies are expensive." The World Bank also noted
that government education expenditures have not kept up with school-age
population growth-both because of lack of resources and budgetary choices-and
that in 1995, the Togolese government allocated almost fifty times as much
money for each tertiary-level student as for each elementary-level student. In
its country study of child trafficking in Togo, ILO-IPEC asked ninety-six
trafficked children whether they had ever attended school and, if so, whether
and when they had dropped out. Of eighty-four trafficked children who ever had
attended school, 81 percent had already dropped out prior to being recruited by
traffickers. M. Tovo, "World Bank poverty assessment," p. xi; Abalo, "Trafic
des enfants au Togo," p. xix. See also UNICEF-WCARO, "Workshop on
Trafficking in Child Domestic Workers," p. 22; Bazzi-Veil, "Trafic des enfants
en Afrique de l'Ouest et du Centre," p. 9; R. Salah, "Child Trafficking," p. 4;
Boonpala and Kane, "Trafficking of Children," p. 21.

[42]See U.N. Economic and Social Council, "Youth at the United Nations:
Country Profiles of the Situation of Youth," at
esa.un.org/socdev/unyin/countrya.asp?countrycode=tg (accessed June 5, 2002);
U.N. Statistics Division, "Togo: Millenium Indicators," at
unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_results.asp?crID=768 (accessed July 6, 2002). In
1997, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child noted that while the
principle of "free, universal and compulsory basic education for all children"
is recognized by Togo, it was "concerned at the low level of school enrolment
and the high drop-out rate, especially among girls, resulting in high
illiteracy rates, the lack of learning and teaching facilities and the shortage
of trained teachers, particularly in rural areas." See United Nations,
"Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child: Togo,"
U.N. Document CRC/C/15/Add.83 (New York: U.N. Publications, 1997), para. 25.

[48]
According to 2002 joint estimates developed by UNAIDS, UNICEF, USAID and the
U.S. Bureau of Census, the total number of living children under age fifteen
whose mother, father or both parents have died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is
11 million. The Synergy Project, "Children on the Brink 2002: A Joint Report
on Orphan Estimates and Program Strategies" (Washington, D.C.: USAID, July
2002).

[50]
In one of several primary schools surveyed in the CARE/World Bank study, 100 of
214 students were orphans, of whom more than half had lost at least one parent
to AIDS. A.Y. Akolatse and K.T. Djonoukou, "Analyse de la situation des
orphelins, veuves et familles affectées du SIDA dans la Region maritime en vue
de la réalisation d'un programme de prise en charge," IDF/RIPPET project (Lomé:
CARE/World Bank, 2001), p. 37. In a different study, the World Bank found that
orphans in Togo, defined as children who have lost either a mother or both
parents, were about 20 percent less likely to attend school than children with
two parents.

[51]
Ibid., p. 37. The vulnerability of AIDS-affected children to hazardous and
exploitative labor has been documented in other parts of Africa. See
for example Human Rights Watch, "In the Shadow of Death: HIV/AIDS and
Children's Rights in Kenya," A Human Rights Watch report, vol. 13, no.
4(A), June 2001; UNICEF East and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO),
"Child Labor in the Shadow of HIV/AIDS" (Nairobi: UNICEF-ESARO, April 2002);
Synergy Project, "Children on the Brink 2002."

[52]
Akolatse and Djonoukou, "Analyse de la situation des orphelins," p. 36. Girls
may be more likely to contract HIV as a result of labor exploitation, as
occupations such as prostitution or domestic work expose them to sexual
violence and coercion as well as unprotected sex generally. See, e.g.,
UNICEF, "Child Domestic Work"; Human Rights Watch, "In the Shadow of Death," p.
16.

[53]
In the 2001 CARE/World Bank study, one Togolese therapist is quoted as saying
that "AIDS is a new sickness that causes fear. It is a sickness of gypsies and
prostitutes." Fidèle Avajon, director of an NGO that used to work with AIDS
orphans, told Human Rights Watch that "families don't accept easily that
someone among their relatives died of AIDS. We had families where we knew
someone died of AIDS, and we tried to help. But the family refused our help
because they didn't want to admit the death was from AIDS." Arsène Mensah,
program coordinator of the NGO Aide Médicale et de Charité, attributed the
stigma to early information campaigns saying "AIDS is death." "If a family
knows that someone in the family has AIDS, they withdraw from that person," he
said. "People are still afraid of being contaminated." See Akolatse
and Djonoukou, "Analyse de la situation des orphelins," p. 30; Human Rights
Watch interview with Fidèle Avajon, director, Association pour une Meilleure
Intégration Sociale, Lomé, May 7, 2002; Human Rights Watch interview with
Arsène Mensah, Aide Médicale et de Charité, Lomé, May 7, 2002.

[60]
According to the Bazzi-Veil study, parts of Togo experience high poverty but
low rates of child trafficking. The study also notes that the migration of
Malian girls into domestic service is motivated less by poverty than by the
acquisition of a trousseau and the desire to experience city life. A recent
World Bank study of child trafficking in Benin concluded that child trafficking
was less a response to poverty than a "strategic fostering out of children"
reserved for families with a certain level of savings and the ability to plan
for the future. See Bazzi-Veil, "Trafic des enfants en Afrique de
l'Ouest et du Centre," p. 9; e-mail communication to Human Rigths Watch from
Anne Kielland, May 30, 2002.

[63]
A.F. Adihou, "Summary of the final report on trafficking of children between
Benin and Gabon" (London: ASI, 2000), p. 9.

[64]
A description of the plan is available through End Child Prostitution and
Trafficking (ECPAT), at www.ecpat.net/eng/Ecpat_inter/projects/monitoring/online_database/countries.asp?arrCountryID=174&CountryProfile=&CSEC=&Implement=&Nationalplans=National_plans_of_action&orgWorkCSEC=&DisplayBy=optDisplayCountry
(accessed July 10, 2002).

[65]
The boys interviewed ranged in age from nine to seventeen when trafficked, and
the girls ranged from three to seventeen. An additional eighteen children were
interviewed, some of whose stories would not qualify as child trafficking, and
others whose testimony did not disclose sufficient evidence to make a determination.
All statistical data in this section are intended to describe Human Rights
Watch's witnesses, not to generalize about the larger population of trafficked
children.

[66]
The school system in Togo is divided into six years of primary school, four
years of collège or middle school and three years of lycée or
secondary school. For this report, the designations grades one through twelve
will be used.

[76]
According to a 1998-1999 ASI study on the trafficking of girls between Benin
and Gabon, the women responsible for trafficked girls are often called "auntie"
to give an illusion of a familial bond. A.F. Adihou, "Trafficking of children
between Benin and Gabon," p. 10.Human Rights Watch was not able to
confirm in most cases whether the "aunt" or "auntie" referred to by a
trafficked child was indeed a relative by blood or marriage.

[78]
International conventions define child trafficking as a "practice similar to
slavery" whether or not the child is unpaid or kept under physical
constraints. This is discussed in greater detail under "Legal Protection
against Child Trafficking," below.

[96]
Port Harcourt and surrounding areas were identified as transit points in a 1998
UNICEF-Gabon study cited in ILO-IPEC's 2001 country study. Birgit Schwarz, a
German journalist who has documented child trafficking in West Africa, told
Human Rights Watch that girls were harbored in the coastal areas of the Niger
Delta in such towns as Oron and Ibuno. Calabar was identified as a transit
point in ILO-IPEC's country study of child trafficking in Nigeria, cited in the
2001 synthesis report. The Niger Delta, where many Togolese girls are left to
wait for boats to Gabon, is a coastal wetland formed by the River Niger.
Abalo, "Trafic des enfants au Togo," note 8. Human Rights Watch telephone
interview with Birgit Schwarz, Der Spiegel, New York, June 4, 2002.
ILO-IPEC, "Sythesis report," p. 25.

[97]
A dough made of cassava (manioc); the staple starch in much of West Africa.

[145]
Anne Kielland, a consultant for the World Bank, told Human Rights Watch she
found a similar pattern in several unofficial interviews with child sex workers
in Benin in the late 1990s. Kielland interviewed seventy-one child sex
workers, of whom twenty-four were Togolese, in two cities in Benin. In her
view, at least 80 percent of the girls had initially been employed as domestic
workers in Benin, "many of them probably trafficked." E-mail communication to
Human Rights Watch from Anne Kielland, May 30, 2002.

[150]
The sex workers interviewed by PSI came not only from Togo, but from Ghana,
Nigeria, and Benin. Many said they had entered sex work because, having been
mistreated by their host families, they were forced to escape and live in the
street. PSI-Togo, "Visite de reconnaissance."

[157]
Although Kodjovi-Numado was not able to provide figures on the percentage of
girls who test HIV-positive, she said there were two children currently living
in the Oasis Center who had tested positive. She was not, however, able to
confirm whether these two children had been trafficked. Human Rights Watch
interview with Amina Kodjovi-Numado, director, Oasis Project, Terre des Hommes,
Lomé, May 7, 2002.

[164]
Although the girl did not identify the border she attempted to cross, she did
say she was bound for Nigeria and that she and her aunt "only got as far as
Lomé" before "the police caught up with us at the border." The border was
probably the one between Togo and Benin, approximately 70 kilometers from
Lomé. Human Rights Watch interview, Bassar, May 3, 2002.

[170]
By comparison, the ILO-IPEC country study on child trafficking in Togo
concluded that boys were "principally sent to Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire."
Abalo, "Trafic des enfants au Togo," p. xv. The fact that only one child
interviewed by Human Rights Watch was trafficked into factory work in Côte
d'Ivoire does not mean the phenomenon is rare. Human Rights Watch only
conducted interviews of formerly trafficked children currently residing in
Togo. This may have excluded entire groups of children still living and
working abroad in Côte d'Ivoire or any number of "receiving" countries. The
fact that so many boys reported doing agricultural work in Nigeria may reflect
the fact that these boys were instructed by their traffickers to return home to
Togo after a period of work.

[171]
A more detailed discussion is provided in Section VIII: "Legal Protection
against Child Trafficking," below.

[223]
This obligation is found in international conventions discussed in Section
VIII: Legal Protection, below, as well as in the national laws and practices of
individual states.

[224]
Adihou, "Trafficking of children between Benin and Gabon,"p. 13.

[225]
Repatriation does not always occur pursuant to a formal agreement: while an
anti-trafficking protocol has existed among Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana
since 1996, no formal agreement exists as yet between Togo and Gabon.

[228]
Human Rights Watch interview with Suzanne Aho, Lomé, May 6, 2002. These
accounts are theoretically blocked until children reach the age of majority,
although Aho said this rule was difficult to enforce over the will of children
and parents.

[232]
One NGO official recounted an incident in which her organization and the
Ministry of Social Affairs jointly developed a protocol to reintegrate boys who
had been trafficked to Côte d'Ivoire. Two of the children were orphans, so the
NGO arranged for alternative care for them. "All of a sudden [Social Affairs]
decided to place them," the NGO official told Human Rights Watch. "It was,
'you go here, you go there,' and that's it." Human Rights Watch interview with
an NGO official, Lomé, May 2002.

[239]
U.S. State Department, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2001:
Gabon, at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/af/8374.htm (accessed August
29, 2002); U.S. State Department, 2002 Trafficking in Persons Report: Gabon,
at www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2002/10679.htm (accessed August 29, 2002).

[262]
"Common Platform for Action of the Sub-Regional Consultation on the Development
of Strategies to Fight Child Trafficking for Exploitative Labour Purposes in
West and Central Africa" (Libreville: February 22-24, 2000).

[264]See e.g., Executive Secretariat, "ECOWAS Initial Plan of Action against
Trafficking in Persons (2002-2003)" (Dakar: ECOWAS, 2001); First Specialized
Meeting on the trafficking and exploitation of children in west and central
Africa, "Rapport de Synthèse"; Yamoussoukro Declaration on the Trafficking of
Children in West and Central Africa (2002); First International Meeting for the
Harmonization of National Legislation against the Exploitation of Children in
the Francophone Region and other African Countries, "Declaration of Ministers"
(Bamako: March 28-29, 2002). See also, UNICEF, "Child Trafficking in
West Africa: Policy Responses," Innocenti Insight (Florence: Innocenti Research
Centre, 2002), pp. 3-4.

[267]
OAU Council of Ministers, "Decision on the report of the twenty-fifth ordinary
session of the OAU Labour and Social Affairs Commission/Ministerial Conference
on Employment and Poverty Reduction in Africa (Durban: June 28-July 6, 2002).

[271]
This provision reinforces article 24(1) of the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (1976) guaranteeing children "the right to such measures
of protection as are required by his status as a minor," as well as the
Convention on the Rights of the Child's article 19(1), which guarantees
protection from "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse,
neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual
abuse, while in the care of parent(s)."

[272]
Article 9(1) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child provides that "a
child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except
when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, in accordance
with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the
best interests of the child." Article 3(1) of the Convention on the Rights of
the Child obliges states to make the best interests of the child a "primary
consideration" in "all actions concerning children."

[273]
U.N. General Assembly, Declaration on Social and Legal Principles relating to
the Protection and Welfare of Children, with special reference to Foster
Placement and Adoption Nationally and Internationally (1986)., art.5.

[274]
United Nations, "Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the
Child: Togo," para. 27.

[275]
United Nations, "Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the
Child: Togo," para. 22.

[276]
Trafficking Protocol, art. 3. The Trafficking Protocol provides the foundation
for the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention's "Global Programme
Against Trafficking in Human Beings," a three-year study. Before the adoption
of the Trafficking Protocol, the most widely-cited definition of trafficking
was a 1994 definition of the U.N. General Assembly: "the illicit and
clandestine movement of persons across national and international borders,
largely from developing countries and some countries with economies in
transition, with the end goal of forcing women and girl-children into sexually
or economically oppressive and exploitative situations for the profit of
recruiters, traffickers and crime syndicates, as well as other illegal
activities related to trafficking, such as forced domestic labour, false
marriages, clandestine employment and false adoption."

[284]
The ILO's Convention 29 concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour (1930) (ratified
by Togo on June 7, 1960) and Convention 105 concerning the abolition of Forced
Labour (1957) (ratified by Togo on July 10, 1999) aim to eradicate "all work or
service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for
which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily." Convention 111
concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation (1960)
(ratified by Togo on November 8, 1983) governs discrimination against women in
the workplace, including gender-based violence and exploitation of women in the
employment sphere. The issue of child labor is addressed by Convention 138
concerning Minimum Age for Admission to Employment (1976) (ratified by Togo on
March 16, 1984), which obliges states parties to "raise progressively the
minimum age for admission to employment or work to a level consistent with the
fullest physical and mental development of young persons" (art. 1). The
Minimum Age Convention sets at eighteen the minimum age for admission to "any type
of employment or work which by its nature or the circumstances in which it is
carried out is likely to jeopardize the health, safety or morals of young
persons."

[285]
As noted above, "exploitation" is not defined under international law, and
"forced labor" is defined in article 2.1 of ILO Convention No. 29 Concerning
Forced Labour as "all work or service which is exacted from any person under
the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself
voluntarily (art 3(1))."

[287]
It should be noted that the Trafficking Protocol contains weaker language on
protecting trafficked children (see articles 6 and 7) than on prosecuting
traffickers (article 5).

[288]
In 1997, for example, the Committee on the Rights of the Child drew Togo's
attention to the Stockholm Agenda. See United Nations, "Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child: Togo," para. 53.
Additional, non-legal sources of child protection measures are Economic and
Social Council, "Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and
Human Trafficking: Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights to the Economic and Social Council," U.N. Doc. E/2002/100 (New York:
U.N. Publications, May 20, 2002), pp. 3, 10-11, 12-13; "Human Rights Standards
for the Treatment of Trafficked Persons," at
www.hrlawgroup.org/initiatives/trafficking_persons and
wagner.inet.co.th/org/gaatw/index.html (accessed September 3, 2002); and A.D.
Jordan, "The Annotated Guide to the Complete U.N. Trafficking Protocol"
(Washington, D.C.: International Human Rights Law Group, 2002).

[289]
First World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children,
"Declaration and Agenda for Action" (1996), art. 5.

[290]
U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and
Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956), art. 1(d).

[292]
These interviews are recounted in detail in "Girls trafficked into domestic and
market labor," above.

[293]
UNICEF, "Child Domestic Workers," p. 2. UNICEF also noted that domestic work
performed under these circumstances violates girls' rights to independent
identity, selfhood and freedom (U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child
articles 8, 13, 15, and 37); parental nurture and guidance (U.N. Convention on
the Rights of the Child articles 7, 8 and 9); physical and psychological
well-being (U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child articles 19 and 27);
educational development (U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child article
28);and protection from exploitation,
including sexual exploitation, sale and trafficking (U.N. Convention on the
Rights of the Child articles 32, 34 and 35).

[294]
These countries are implicated by testimony in this report; however, within the
West Africa region the ILO has also documented child trafficking in Burkina
Faso, Cameroon and Mali.

[295]
Article 9 requires states to (1) to the extent appropriate and consistent with
their legal systems, adopt legislative, administrative or other effective
measures to promote integrity and to prevent, detect and punish the corruption
of public officials; and (2) take measures to ensure effective action by their
authorities in the prevention, detection and punishment of the corruption of
public officials, including providing such authorities with adequate
independence to deter the exertion of inappropriate influence on their actions.

[296]
As noted above, both the United States and the European Union have suspended
development assistance to Togo since the early 1990s due to a lack of free and
fair elections.

[297]
U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2001,
p. 17.

[301]
At this writing, international assistance for Togo's anti-trafficking efforts
included a U.S.$302,000 grant from the World Bank; a share of a U.S.$4,200,000
grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to ILO-IPEC for regional
anti-trafficking efforts; and a $2,000,000 grant from the U.S. Department of
Labor for a "Child Labor Education Initiative," disbursed in October 2002.